Fish Piper

This post is in response to a couple of people asking me how to set up Unicode input on a Mac. If it’s more broadly useful, excellent.

If you’re someone who uses languages with character sets other than Roman (i.e. what this post is written with) with any frequency, then you need to do this. Stop stuffing around with fonts that pretend to show other languages, start writing properly with the right characters.

If you need more convincing, or if you want a brief overview of what the heck Unicode is and why it matters, Joe Weaks has an excellent overview aimed at those who work with the original Biblical languages.

Note: The following instructions are for the Mac. If you use Windows, then you’ll have to look further afield (actually, just in the Control Panel/Language settings).

Step 1:

Go get the Tyndale House Font Kit for Mac. It includes a couple of keyboard maps plus the Cardo Font, which is pretty good (not perfect, but useful nonetheless).

Step 2:

Unzip it.
Drag the Hebrew keyboard layout to Library/Keyboard Layouts.
You don’t need the Greek layout.

Step 3:

Open up System Preferences, select ‘International’, then ‘Input Menu’.

Find the Greek Polytonic Layout, and the HebrewTH layout you just installed. Select them.

Also check the ’show input menu in menu bar’. This will put a flag up in the menu bar. You can click this flag to select your input source:

I prefer a keyboard shortcut to cycle through these. I’ve set it to be option-space (since I have cmd-space as spotlight, and ctrl-space for quicksilver). Repeatedly hitting this shortcut toggles back and forth between the previously selected keyboard and the current one. Hitting option-shift-space cycles through the list.

This is what my preference window looks like (it might only group the selected layouts together when you open it up next):

Note the Greek Polytonic and HebrewTH keyboard layouts selected along with the Australian one.

How do I use it?

When you’re typing, hit ⌥-space, ανδ σταρτ τυπινγ ιν Γρεεκ. Hit it again, and back to Latin characters. Hit ⇧⌥-space, and you get Hebrew: ברא אדמ. It works pretty well.

Cardo is a nice font that covers the full set of Hebrew and Greek characters, along with the Latin characters. It’s Latin stuff is pretty awful though, so if you want a font that covers everything without needing to toggle between languages, stick to either Times or Helvetica.

Hebrew Vowel and Accent points

The HebrewTH layout, whilst being quite sensibly laid out and easy to use, fails to cover certain oft-used marks, such as composite vowels. To get to these, open up the Character Palette, which is one of the options in the menu when you click on that flag in the menu bar.

If you navigate to the Hebrew section, you’ll be able to insert all manner of accents, vowels, and cantillation marks. Below is an example, with the best approximation to the ‘accent’ marker used by many Hebrew grammars, the ‘ole’ cantillation point:

Voila (Olé!).