SophoKeys

I had to place the bundle file in the "Keyboard Layouts" folder in my computer's Library folder to get it to work. It didn't work in the "Keyboards" folder in my user's Library folder. I'm using Tiger.

Please let me modify my previous review, with apologies to the author. My impression was that one particular Greek font, which doesn't work particularly well, was installed as part of the SophoKeys installation package, and most of my critical remarks were directed against that font. Now I have learned that these problems have nothing to do with SophoKeys, which seems to be a simple and straightforward keyboard remap that works as advertised.

Why should someone nowadays learn to type polytonic with the betacode conventions instead of using a normal polytonic keyboard? Apart from GreekKeys there are some other ones available in the internet and there are rumors that Tiger will have a polytonic keyboard. BetaCode was good and very useful 20 years ago for writing the huge numbers of ancient greek texts for TLG and Perseus. Of course Benjamin should be congratulated for his effort as this is the first betacode keyboard for the mac and still it may be useful for some people. Keep on the nice work!

Great way to get a polytonic Greek output and get used to using betacode at the same time! More and more I find that betacode is something that you had better master, but up to now I didn't use it because I wanted to see those Greek characters on my screen. Best of both worlds.

Thank you for your time creating this.

As the developer of SophoKeys, I would like to make a short response to Professor Sutton's misguided comments. My product is -not- a font. SophoKeys is a keyboard layout for Mac OS X. It intercepts virtual keystrokes (the codes produced by the depression of a key on a keyboard) and changes them into Unicode characters. The standard U.S. keyboard layout produces an 'a' when one presses the 'a' key on a U.S. keyboard, whereas SophoKeys instead maps that event to the Unicode character for a Greek alpha, unless other specific keys are afterwards pressed to produce accent marks. Once that alpha character is drawn, the user is free to format it with whatever font he or she chooses, so long as it contains the proper Unicode glyph. Moreover, SophoKeys does not ship with any extra fonts, with serifs or otherwise. It simply produces Unicode output which can then be formatted however the user chooses. If GreekKeys did not ship with additional fonts, it would do precisely same thing. Regarding the criticism that SophoKeys does not support Roman characters: if Professor Sutton is suggesting that one cannot type them with SophoKeys enabled, he is correct. With GreekKeys it is similarly impossible, as the entire keyboard is remapped to produce Greek output. Fortunately Apple provides an easy way to switch back to the standard layout, by either selecting it in the Input menu or by pressing a simpley keystroke (default layout cycling is accomplished with cmd-opt-space). This makes it easy to produce documents with both Greek and Roman characters - the screenshot available on the SophoKeys website is proof enough of that. If instead he means that SophoKeys does not have any Roman characters, this is also true - but truly, SophoKeys has none, as it is not a font at all! SophoKeys is not GreekKeys, and of course provides a different keyboard mapping. For a user accustomed to writing Beta Code, SophoKeys is actually quite standard and provides an easy way to produce beautiful output from a well-known input method. For those new to Greek input on the Macintosh, I would even hazard to say that SophoKeys is an easier system to memorize than that which GreekKeys provides.

This is a good-looking font, and Mac-using classicists have an urgent need for a serifed polytonic font that has genuine boldface and italic styles (Lucida Grande does not, and so displays incorrectly on some browsers, including Safari) and contains that Extended Greek range of glyphs. We have to beg, borrow, or steal a copy of Palatino Linotype from our Windows-using friends, and that is not a particularly handsome font. BUT those of use who type polytonic Greek are used to the standard Greek Keys Unicode keyboard remap, distributed with the approval of the American Philological Association, and I doubt many people who would otherwise use this font are interested in learning an oddball keyboard layout. Even worse, this appears to be a font that has the Extended Greek range of glyphs only, not a full Roman and Greek combination, so it might be of use for a word processor, it certainly won't be for preparing Greek (or Roman pages with some Greek embedded) for the Web, which is where Unicode really comes into its own. In fact, it's even goofier than I'm saying: using the handy Unicode Font Info utility, I can't figure out where the heck this font keeps its glyphs, I can't get them to show up in any panel I'd expect to find them. By now there is plenty of standardization in polytonic font architecture, and any new font ought to observe these conventions.

Looks cool...but it's all Greek to me. Lame, I know. But I couldn't resist.

Excellent! Exceptionally useful for simplifying the typing of Ancient Greek. A great imporvement against diving into the character palette each time you need a breathing!