[B-Greek] Adding accents
John Jenkins
jhjenkins at me.com
Wed Feb 17 00:39:17 EST 2010
On Feb 16, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
>
> And my point is, this should be possible on any OS that uses Unicode.
> As you saw, both Daniel and I know how to set this up for our respective
> OSs, but were unable to give directions on exactly what to do for other
> operating systems. This is why the original poster (Ruth) still hasn't been
> given a solution to her Mac problem. But hopefully this thread will help her
> (and others who search the archive in the future) to fix things for
> themselves.
I contacted her privately, but for the sake of posterity--
The built-in keyboards that come with Mac OS X (including the two Greek ones) do have some reasons for preferring precombined characters and dead keys over combining accents. One of them is lagging support for combining accents in fonts. One is history. The big problem, however, is that Mac OS X does not normalize text as the user inputs it. Since polytonic Greek allows multiple accents on a single letter, this means that if a keyboard with combining accents is used, the user may accidentally input accents in the "wrong" order (e.g., acute accent before breathing mark), and the system wouldn't automatically correct it. The dead key approach doesn't have this problem because the keyboard normalizes the text before handing it off.
That said, it's really quite easy to create custom keyboards on Mac OS X. There is an excellent free program from SIL called Ukulele that lets you edit keyboards. You can even clone one of the ones that comes with the system and modify it as you feel necessary. Once you have a keyboard created, you just have to copy it to one of the two standard locations for keyboards (depending on whom you want to have access), and then access it the way you would any other keyboard. Making a custom keyboard that lets you type the accents after the letters and even put theta on the Q key is fairly straightforward.
And I'd be more than happy to help anyone out who may need it with the process.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jhjenkins at me.com
http://preem.tejat.net/~tseng
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