Hi there,
I see I’m probably a bit late to the party, but I thought I’d share my two cents for the German keyboard layout anyway, maybe it’s worth something to someone.
I agree with most of what’s been said about the German keyboard layout:
- “Druck” button instead of the “PRT SCR” is on all the German keyboards I’ve encountered.
- “Bild” instead of “page” as well.
- “Fn-Sperre” ->I’ve also seen “Fn” with a lock symbol next to it or a white status led, while I would agree with another user in the posts saying the indicator light is important.
- Caps lock down arrow instead of up arrow is common on German Keyboard layouts. Other symbols I have seen on German keyboards (exclusively or with the down arrow) are a big “A” in a square box and/or a lock symbol next to it.
One point I feel very strongly about though, is the lowercase first letters on the special keys. I perceive it as definitely being grammatically wrong. As other users have mentioned; German capitalizes all nouns.
I understand to some extent that one might think they can get away with saying it’s a “style”, writing German all lowercase. I strongly disagree with this though. While this is a style, it is generally only done in texts to friends and family, etc. because of ease of typing and speed, definitely nothing official.
To everyone interested, not natively speaking German, I’d like to explain the problem. In the German language, capital letters play an essential role in defining the meaning of a word and are used a lot more, than let’s say in English. It can define if a word is a noun or for instance a verb. Writing a noun small, simply put, is misspelling it. It is comparable to writing “kiboard” instead of “keyboard”, or writing “weight” instead of “wait”, which is not only spelled wrong, but also has a completely different meaning.
That said; I would argue that if writing German special keys lowercase is problematic, writing a hyphenated German word lowercase is even more problematic. 
This is obviously just my opinion and I’m not trying to offend anyone with this point of view.
I realize that being this opinionated on a subject matter like this seldom helps to be productive in a discussion, so I’ll try and get some objectivity into it.
I currently happen to be procrastinating in a university building and decided I’d do a micro survey going around, taking photos of all the uniquely different keyboards I find here in a 20m radius. Obviously, this is not very scientific, but I promise I didn’t exclude any encountered keyboards along the way.
The keyboards I found were:
- Old Microsoft keyboard
- Old Dell Keyboard
- Old Logitech keyboard
- New Dell Keyboard
- MSI Gaming laptop
- Lenovo Thinkpad
- Microsoft Surface (Original type cover)
I’ll include the photos at the end.
The findings of this micro survey are:
- 7/7 keyboards have capital first letters on special keys (except for the MSI Gaming laptop, which has all caps)
- “Druck” 7/7
- “Bild” 7/7
- Capslock with an up Arrow 1/7 (Lenovo Thinkpad)
- Capslock with a down arrow 5/7
- Capslock with an “A” in a box 3/7
- Capslock with a locking symbol 1/7
- Only the more modern keyboards(4) had an “FN” key
- 1/4 was without a dedicated lock symbol,
- 1/4 was a lock Symbol with “Fn” written in it,
- 1/4 had “FnLock” written in it (Lenovo Thinkpad)
- 1/4 had the “Fn” key with an extra led showing the status of the lock.
Conclusion:
- Lowercase on special keys → DONT DO IT!
- “Druck” seems legit
- “Bild” seems legit
- Capslock with a down arrow definitely seems to be the way to go, feel free to sprinkle a symbol or two into the mix.
- “Fn” → It’s absolute anarchy out there. Personally, I’d prefer the Fn Lock Symbol with a light. But “Fn-Sperre” seems fine too.
Cheers!
