[B-Greek] Subject:, Fw: B-Greek Digest, Vol 100, Issue 15 - greek fonts and online teaching

John Schwandt jschwandt at nsa.edu
Sun Apr 17 11:23:38 EDT 2011


Hi Georg and Oun, (Full text this time, my three year old daughter somehow
tapped the send button with her foot while I was typing.)

I think both of your suggestions are hitting at the same idea.  Why not just
use a sequence of dead keys for the accents instead of shift states?

The problem is that windows only allows for only one dead key (Mac's can
stack them up). So we can't create a character in Windows with more than two
key strokes.  This creates a problem for characters with more than one
diacritical mark.  Not only has this resulted in the standard Windows
polytonic keyboard with a serious number of key locations to cover all of
the possible diacritical combinations, they have to be pressed prior to a
vowel receiving the accent (This is counter intuitive since one would write
the letter first then the mark if writing by hand.)

So I only see three options.
1) It is possible to move all of the standard window's accent keys around,
but while that might might the accents easier to reach, it would be no less
complicated and risk moving away from the Greek national keyboard layout.

2) One could run a shell program like Keyman to allow for multiple dead
keys.  (I did this for a number of years but don't like the idea of shell
programs.)

3) One could use a combination of one dead key (I use it for breathers and
subscripts) and shift states.  Not only are these locations easier to
remember, they produce the accent at the same time as the letter which is
more intuitive than keying them prior to the letter.  Of course, if you are
using some of the same shift state for other things you may have to adjust
those.

I think I avoided the typical alt-shift problem by restricting the alt to
(ctl + alt or right alt).  I don't think it would conflict with the left
alt-shift for switching keyboards.

Blessings (and foot tapping blessings from my daughter),
John Schwandt
Senior Fellow, New Saint Andrews College



>
>
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 12:47 PM, George F Somsel <gfsomsel at yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> I would recommend assigning a separate sequence for each keyboard since
>> using
>> <alt-sft> to cycle through them can leave you wondering which keyboard is
>> active
>> at the time (until you begin to type).  I use <lft alt. sft, 1> for
>> English,
>> <lft alt, sft, 2> for Greek, <lft alt, sft, 3> for Hebrew, <lft alt,
>> sft, 4> for
>> Syriac so that I always know what language I'm using.
>>  george
>> gfsomsel
>>
>>
>> … search for truth, hear truth,
>> learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth,
>> defend the truth till death.
>>
>>
>> - Jan Hus
>> _________
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: "John Barach, Sr" <jbarach at motorera.com>
>> To: susan at read-the-bible.org; b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> Sent: Sat, April 16, 2011 9:51:57 AM
>> Subject: [B-Greek] Subject:, Fw: B-Greek Digest, Vol 100, Issue 15 - greek
>> fonts
>> and online teaching
>>
>> If you are using Vista or Win 7, you can configure your keyboard so that
>> by hitting the left Alt and Shift keys, you can switch from English to
>> Greek (and back).
>> Control Panel > Clock,Language,Region > Change keyboards or other input
>> methods > Change Keyboards > Add >
>> Scroll to Greek and click the + beside the word Greek to open the menu
>> Click the + beside keyboard
>> Select Greek Polytonic (it has all the accents and breathing marks)
>> Then OK out of all the windows.
>>
>> You can do the same for Hebrew or other languages if you like. Alt+Shift
>> will rotate between/among the languages you have selected.
>>
>> This will work in Word or Notepad++ and other word processing programs
>> and will create unicode letters.
>> Cheers,
>> John Barach
>> http://www.motorera.com
>>
>>
>> ---
>> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
>> B-Greek mailing list
>> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
>> ---
>> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
>> B-Greek mailing list
>> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
>>
>
>



More information about the B-Greek mailing list