Tuesday, April 3, 2012

A New Way To Make Custom Keyboard Layouts

An earlier article described how you can customize the new Character Picker introduced with OS X 10.7 Lion, so that the popup menu that appears when you hold down a key can contain whatever characters you want.

This feature strikes me as more revolutionary that it might first appear. A custom popup menu can also contain combining diacritics (Unicode block 0300 - 036F). That means you can set up a single key which, when held down, will let you add any arbitrary diacritic(s) to any base letter you have just typed. This has the potential to be a lot easier than the usual US Extended and other layouts with their complex systems of option and option + shift shortcuts. Perhaps the use of those modifier keys to create special characters can be done away with altogether.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Resources for Cuneiform Language Work

These two pages give up-to-date font and keyboard layout resources for OS X for those working with Cuneiform script and/or its Latin transliteration:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/fonts

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/keyboards

For inputting Cuneiform from the keyboard:

http://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/download/NesiliKeys 2.0.zip