Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post Reply
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post by cwconrad »

What experience can any iPad users report on typing ancient Greek with the proper diacritical marks?
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Peter Pankonin
Posts: 31
Joined: May 31st, 2011, 11:18 am
Location: Lethbridge, Alberta, CANADA

Re: Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post by Peter Pankonin »

I use the keyman app with good success. http://keyman.com/iphone-and-ipad/
--
Πέτρος Πανκώνιν
"There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't"
Thomas Dolhanty
Posts: 401
Joined: May 20th, 2014, 10:13 am
Location: west coast of Canada

Re: Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post by Thomas Dolhanty »

I seldom use my iPad for actually typing Greek. However, when I have had occasion to type Polytonic Greek on my iPad, I have found the Greek Polytonic app to be quite nice. For IOS 8 and above you can use the keyboard in any app, if you enable it in Settings.
γράφω μαθεῖν
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post by cwconrad »

Thomas Dolhanty wrote:I seldom use my iPad for actually typing Greek. However, when I have had occasion to type Polytonic Greek on my iPad, I have found the Greek Polytonic app to be quite nice. For IOS 8 and above you can use the keyboard in any app, if you enable it in Settings.
That really looks splendid, Thomas, particularly the way the diacriticals are displayed at the top of the keyboard. I'd agree: the iPad's more suitable to reading than writing, but for short notes, at least, it would be nice to type Greek words and phrases correctly in unicode characters. I appreciate your input, and Peter's as well.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Tim Evans
Posts: 91
Joined: July 10th, 2015, 1:40 am

Re: Greek fonts & keyboards for iOS

Post by Tim Evans »

I also just use the greek polytonic keyboard as well, it gets me the important accents at least, quite quickly and easily.

I also tried some custom keyboard app's but found them to be slow (5 second or greater) to switch to and from greek to english, which can be quite frustrating when you are typing greek words into an English language email. But apart from the slowness, they are usually easier to use.

The downside of these custom keyboard app's is they use a different keyboard layout than the desktop and iPhone greek polytonic layout, drives me insane trying to find the keys. Hence I do now just stick to the "greek polytonic" on both mac and iPhone.
Post Reply

Return to “Unicode and Fonts”