Posted by: John Hudson
In support of the SBL Greek fonts, I intend to produce some Unicode keyboard layouts and drivers. There are a number of polytonic keyboards already available, some of which work with Unicode characters and some of which were made to work with hacked 8-bit encodings. Since users are likely familiar with one of these existing keyboard layouts, I want to ensure that the most popular layouts are available for working with SBL Greek and other Unicode fonts.
In addition to existing keyboard for entering standard polytonic Greek text, most or all of which use a deadkey mechanism to enter sequences of marks and letters, there is a need for a means to enter decomposed Unicode letter + combining mark(s) sequences. Deadkey-based keyboards are only useful for addressing precomposed diacritic characters, so while they can be used to input standard polytonic diacritic letters as encoded in Unicode as precomposed characters, they cannot enter arbitrary combinations of letters + marks. This means they cannot input some of the pre- or non-standard combinations of letters and marks that occur in some ancient documents, or which might be needed in lexicons (e.g. vowels with both macrons and breathing/tone marks). So one of my priorities will be to make a non-deadkey keyboard in which, following Unicode requirements, combining marks are keyed *after* the letter to which they apply. Users may not use this keyboard on a regular basis, but it will be very useful for dealing with unusual texts.
I have done some research into existing kayboard layouts such as GreekKeys and Betacode. I am hoping that the user community can provide some feedback on what layouts they are currently using, what Unicode drivers might already exist for such layouts, and what layouts they would like to be able to use with the SBL Greek fonts.