Koine Greek Keyboard
Koine Greek is a Greek keyboard developed by Char Matejovsky, using Keyman software. It is designed to work on PCs with Unicode fonts that have a full range of Greek and extended or polytonic Greek characters.

Download Koine Greek Keyboard

What is Unicode?
Unicode is a new standard in font design. Until recently, fonts were limited to fewer than 255 characters. That meant that users needed to change fonts to move from one character set to another. And developers of non-Roman fonts did not follow any single layout causing confusion when files moved from one computer to another.

The Unicode Standards Committee has, for years, been developing a font template that assigns all of the world's known characters to set positions on a single font. Because every character in a Unicode font occupies a unique position, users can exchange files, even from PC to Mac and vice versa, without distorting non-Roman characters.

What Unicode fonts have polytonic Greek?
In 1997, Adobe and Microsoft jointly agreed to create fonts based on the Unicode standard. These so-called OpenType fonts began to appear in 2000. Some, but not all, OpenType fonts contain a complete set of Greek characters, including diacritics. One such font is Palatino Linotype which  comes bundled with recent versions of Windows. Other OpenType fonts that have extended Greek are Arial Unicode MS and Gentium, an award winning Unicode font that can be downloaded for free at the following address:

http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/Gentium/

What software supports Unicode?
Unicode fonts work in Word on PC operating systems including Win 98 2nd edition,* Win 2000, Win me, and XP. They also run in InDesign typesetting software on Macs, so Unicode files created on PCs can be used for typesetting on a Mac without any modification. Mac OS X users running version 10.2.8 or higher can get full Unicode support by using Word 2004 for Mac.

What is keyboard mapping?
Keyboard mapping software, such as Keyman, allows developers to replace standard keyboard characters with nonwestern character equivalents. Westar's Koine Greek keyboard uses Keyman software to provide users of PCs with quick, intuitive access to the full Greek character set, including diacritics (see the keyboard layout below).

How does the Koine Greek keyboard work?
You can set Keyman to load automatically when your computer is turned on. When loaded, the Keyman software places an icon — an off-kilter, little gray square with a K in it — in the taskbar near the lower right corner of the computer screen. You toggle the Greek keyboard on/off by clicking on the icon and selecting "Koine Greek" to turn it on and  "no Keyman keyboard" to turn it off. You can also configure Keyman to toggle on and off with a key command of your choosing, such as altG.

When the Koine Greek keyboard is turned on the grey icon appears as a black square and you get Greek (provided, of course, that you are using a Unicode font with a Greek character set). When it is turned off, the black square once again becomes a gray icon and you get the usual Roman characters. There is no need to change fonts to go from Roman to Greek and back since both characters sets are on a single font.

Greek Keyboard Layout
The following Acrobat file lays out the character equivalents for the English to Greek alphabet and for the diacritics. Diacritics must be typed before the character they modify and multiple diacritics may be typed (before the character) in any order.

To print the Greek Layout use the print icon inside the Acrobat file.

Copyright © 2004 by Char Matejovsky, Westar Institute. All rights reserved. .