Multibirman
A personal fork of Ilya Birman's typography layout, not for sale.
Typography on the Option key
Real dashes, matched quotation marks, accented letters and mathematical symbols, reached directly. No character palette, no hunting through menus.
Greek and Ukrainian added
The whole of what this fork changes: two more languages on the same layout, and documentation in four. Everything else is Ilya Birman's.
Nothing to buy, nothing to download
The original carries no licence permitting a modified version to be passed on, and giving files away free is still passing them on. So this page describes the work and links to the original instead.
Multibirman is a personal fork. It is not a laru product, it is not for sale, and it never was — it is on this site because it is part of what is here, and leaving it out would have been tidier than it is honest.
The original is the Birman typography layout, made by Ilya Birman in 2006: one keyboard layout that puts real dashes, matched quotation marks, accented letters and mathematical symbols on the Option key, so you type them instead of hunting for them. It has been the standard among Russian-speaking designers and writers for years. It is his work, it lives at ilyabirman.net/typography-layout, and if you want the layout, that is where to get it.
This fork adds Greek and Ukrainian to the languages the layout covers, and documents itself in four. That is the whole of the change.
Why there is nothing to download here
The original carries no licence granting the right to redistribute a modified version. Not a restrictive licence — no licence at all, and a thank-you in a README is not permission.
The part that is easy to miss: handing out the files free of charge is still distribution. "We are not selling it" is not the exemption people assume it is. So this page describes the work and does not offer it — no download, no price, no button — and it carries no pictures of the layout either, because a diagram of a keyboard layout is a picture of the original design and publishing one is the same act by another route.
The way to change that is to ask Ilya Birman, not to reword this page. Until someone does, this stays a description with a link to the real thing.
Latest change Unreleased
The layout works and is in use, but it is a personal fork rather than a released product.
Nothing will be published here until the licensing question above is settled.