Unicode Goodness

12 11 2008

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’re a Biblical scholar or student, this means you.

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:

inputmenubar.png

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):

internationalprefs.png

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:

Picture 2.png

Voila (Olé!).





Free beer

28 10 2008

Not beer. Software.

Head on over to Code Weavers and take advantage of a free software offer. It’s due to some slightly cheaper petrol prices in the US - which doesn’t concern me at all, but that’s ok - and to celebrate, they’re giving away their CrossOver Pro software for free.

Crossover is a way of running Windows apps and games on the Mac (or Linux), without having to run the whole operating system. If you don’t want to run VMWare, Parallels or BootCamp, or if you want another solution kicking around give it a shot.

It’s for either Mac or Linux. 1 per customer, and is for today only.





Annoying Apple Bugs

24 10 2008

If you’re using Tiger (10.4.x) and have tried to change your network preferences recently, you may well have found yourself in an infinite loop that looks something like this:

prefs_looperror.png

When you press ‘OK’ this modal window pops straight back up again, often needing a Force-Quit to get out of the Preferences.[1]

There is a way to change this (thanks to Mike Allen). Go to the Security panel, and select the ‘Require password to unlock secure system preference’ checkbox:

prefs_security.png

Voila.

Problem solved.


[1] There is a slight workaround to avoid trashing the program, if you’re quick. Move the mouse so it’s over either the ‘Show All’ button, to return to the main menu, or the ‘Configure’ button, to change things slowly and painfully. When you’re set, press the return key and quickly click the mouse button. If you time it right, you send the mouse event before the window pops back up again. Annoying, but possible.





Hear Hear

10 08 2008

Bathgate nails it.

I’m getting more frustrated with Accordance by the day. Not with maps - with the core stuff.

Perhaps some competition will help things along.





Guess what’s coming next

9 06 2008

There are some (many?) newspaper articles that play out exactly like you thought they were going to. Stereotypes are imported wholesale. Straw men are hastily erected, and attacked mercilessly. Certain phrases capture the thought of the piece so concisely and completely, that reading the remainder of the article is just killing time.

Sort of like watching Titanic.

Two articles from the Herald grabbed my attention for this reason over the weekend. One was a tech article, on the opening of the new Apple store in Sydney. The straw men, in this case, are the ‘mac faithful’:

For the cult who worship the Mac, the company co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has become the high priest and the Apple Store his temple. It is a place to go to worship and give thanks for having an alternative to Microsoft, PCs and Windows.

Hmm. That’s right. Mac users are zealots, sort of, you know… different… to normal people.

 

The other was an astounding juxtaposition of ideas, in a short piece on the Anglican church:

 

Archbishop Jensen is one of the leaders of 1000 conservative churchmen from 17 Anglican provinces who will gather at the Jerusalem Global Anglican Futures Conference this month. Mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they are united on one principal issue: hostility to homosexuality.

But Archbishop Jensen argues: “This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”

(h/t David Ould)

Not a great example of listening skills, it seems. 

Fascinating.

 





Not convinced of the value

27 05 2008

For mac users, Accordance version 8 is now out. It looks like there’s a couple of bugs still being worked through (the universal binary didn’t have the help file for a while), so if you’re keen on getting it maybe wait a couple of days.

To be frank, I’m not that impressed with the feature list. The big one is that it’s now a universal binary, which means that on newer Intel-based macs (read: any mac that has been available in the last 2 years or so) it should run with fewer system resources. That’s good, but I’ve never really noticed it being particularly power-hungry anyway, so it’s one of those features that I probably won’t notice much.

More advanced search features sound cool, but I’m yet to be convinced of their utility. Horizontal panes of bible texts - meh.

And the final thing they’re trumpeting is Unicode import. This means you can type/paste unicode characters into the search field and it will actually work, as opposed to now where it simply doesn’t recognise the characters. Presumably you can still export to unicode, but there is no mention of upgraded fonts, so my frustrations continue. The beautiful fonts used to render Greek and Hebrew within Accordance remain accessible only to those who own Accordance. In order to share work effectively, you need to use a sub-standard font, which is really annoying.

I’m amazed that unicode is still not used internally. I’ve done some coding on mac, and it’s really not that difficult to support as far as the programming tools go. Font creation and modification is not impossible either. There must be an awful lot of legacy code that they’re unwilling to change, and very few programmers, over at Accordance HQ. At some point they’re going to have to strip it back and rework it properly, and the longer they wait, the bigger the job will be.

My conclusion? I’m nowhere near impressed enough to shell out for an upgrade. Feel free to convince me otherwise.





Paradigmatic - almost ready-ish

9 04 2008

My paradigm program has been a work in progress for some time. It’s getting pretty functional now, however, and I’m just about to try and inflict it on some friends so they can do some beta-testing and mistake-spotting for me (if you’d like to join them, speak up).

I’ve got the entire regular verb table entered, and a handful of other paradigms. In short, useful for first-year Hebrew students, and those of us who have forgotten some of the basics.

[UPDATE: Link should now work.] If you would like to try it out, you can download Paradigmatic 0.2.0, and give it a go. Please leave feedback on what works, what doesn’t, what you wish it would do, behaviour that you find baffling, etc.

I’ve got a fairly robust viewer, which will display any paradigms already in the database. It doesn’t auto-populate the lists, which I would eventually like to do (i.e. if you select the עמד paradigm, it will only fill it with the available stems/aspects that have been entered for that root), but it works ok for a 0.2 release, at least. Looks good with the Cardo font (and even better on my system, where I’ve hacked the meteg character so that it displays to the left of a vowel, like it should… rather than in the middle).

Paradigmatic Viewer Window

The editor will ultimately be something that a standard user shouldn’t ever need to touch, but the entry system will form the basis of a testing branch that is still on the list of things to do. The editor window allows adding and deleting of whole paradigms, and adding/editing of relevant entries.

Paradigmatic Editor Window

The entry panel, which slides down on top of the editor window, is totally mouse-driven. I’m not sure how user-friendly it would be to add in keyboard support… let me know if you have strong opinions one way or the other. To change the entry, click on the relevant letter and select a value from the contextual menu (left-click for vowels, right/ctrl-click for consonants, cmd-click for punctuation). Hopefully it’s relatively easy to use.

Paradigmatic Entry Pane

Known issues:

- Copy/Paste only sort-of-works: it copies a selected entry (from the entry panel) fine, and can paste it into another entry… but subsequent copy operations do not replace this data. Hmmm.

- The editor window paradigm table (in the top left) doesn’t sort properly to start with.

- Hebrew fonts for Mac kinda suck. I’m using Cardo, but it doesn’t cope properly with Meteg characters. New Peninim MT is ok, but lacks accent and meteg characters, so letters that incorporate them bork and revert to the ugly default, which I think is Arial. If you install Cardo on your system, it will mostly look ok, but you might have trouble making out dagesh points in thin characters, or meteg characters on most vowels. Bah.

Things to work on in the near future (amongst others):

- (Optionally) populate paradigm with relevant data when first created, i.e. if Jussive paradigm created, populate it with Wayyiqtol entries minus initial prefix. This will be intelligent, such that if nothing is found from the same root, it will try other roots with similar irregularities, before defaulting back to the standard paradigm

- Testing function - compare a user’s input with a the saved version of the paradigm

- User-specific data - saving user-modifications in an external file, so that any edits will not be overwritten in a future update.

[Thanks to Bathgate for the icon.]





Localised search goodness

20 03 2008

acidOne of the things that has bugged me for a while about Safari’s built in search box has been the inability to alter the default search engine.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Google, but often I want to search for things in Australia only. http://www.google.com.au/ is great for this, as it gives the option to search the entire web, or pages in Australian domains only. Excellent.

In order to do this effectively, however, I’ve had to navigate manually to the Australian Google site, then search… a minor inconvenience, granted, but one that takes longer than a simple search in the top right.

A minor inconvenience, that is, until now.

Allow me to introduce AcidSearch: a plugin that modifies the search box. You can set up default search engines, custom search paths (e.g. you can easily search for “Kill Bill” on imdb.com), and switch easily between them. It’s gold, it’s free, I like it better than Inquisitor.

Excellent.





Scrivener 1.10

10 11 2007

A new version of the excellent document organisation/writing program Scrivener is out.

I’ve been running the beta version (1.05.something) and it didn’t recognise the updated version, even when I ran ‘Check for Updates’ manually. Having installed the new version however, things are working out nicely. There’s a list of updates as long as your arm… longer, probably.

I use it for organising my lecture notes, writing exegeticals and essays, and even sermons. It’s good gear. Try it if you haven’t already (oh, it’s Mac only. Sorry).





More Accordance

29 10 2007

accordanceThere’s a new version of Accordance out, but it won’t be found by the AccUpdater widget (at least this was true for me. This may have changed). Visit accordancebible.com to download the latest version.

According to Accordance themselves (ha!), this version ‘does not have many new features‘ other than minor bug-fixes, but is now Leopard-ready. Which means that if, like me, you’re running Tiger, then you get a taste of the detached-tabbed look of 10.5:

accordance 7.4 screenshot





Hurrah for muscle memory

13 07 2007

Command KeyThis is a nice little hack for those of you who use macs and need to dive into X11 from time to time, for example if you use the Gimp, Inkscape, or Openoffice.

One of the annoyances in X11 is that shortcuts that apply in the rest of the OS X world don’t apply in X11 (e.g. the ‘copy’ shortcut, ⌘-C, doesn’t apply for something like the Gimp. You need to do ctrl-C instead, which throws out all your hard-earned muscle memory).

So the trick is this. The Cmd key (⌘) is designated the ‘meta’ key in X11. I don’t use the meta key for any of my apps. If you don’t know what it is, then you probably don’t either.

We then just map the function of the control key over to the command key, so they do the same job. This means all the normal ctrl- shortcuts work as normal, and all the native application muscle memory works nicely too.

What you need to do is create a file called .Xmodmap in your home directory (or just add to it if it already exists). Enter the following lines:

clear Mod2clear
controlkeycode 63 = Control_L
keycode 67 = Control_L
add control = Control_L

This code maps the Control key to the command key, so they effectively do the same thing.

Now go into your X11 preferences. You should uncheck the ‘Use the system keyboard layout’ option.

Next time you start up X11, it should be re-mapped. Voila.

Note: The code from this came from //extrabright. Many thanks.





Hurrah for sanity

8 02 2007

An update on zealotry:

The Tao of Mac has an article on “switching” from PC/other to a Mac, and refuses to talk about motives, as they’re largely irrelevant:

Quasi-religious beliefs that any platform is better than another are not just irrelevant, but plain childish and stupid. Before maligning the , or , make sure you know what you are talking about - most people in the business have “pet hatreds” towards one platform or another out of sheer ignorance, and more than a decade in the business has shown me that anyone who only has bad things to say about any given platform probably doesn’t know what (s)he’s talking about.

Fantastic.





Zealotry

7 02 2007

When I was at uni, I knew a guy who used to say his biggest hero in the Bible was Phineas, of Numbers 25 fame. Admittedly, God saying that you are “as zealous as I am for my honor” is nothing short of extraordinary… but to class him as your ultimate hero? A little eye-glazed mad-zealot for my taste. Then again, maybe I’m just soft and conservative.

As I’ve said before, I’m getting a new mac. So for the past few months, in my research, I’ve been scouring web blogs and discussion boards, trying to make an informed decision about what I’m spending quite a reasonable amount of money on.

Boy, do Apple zealots like to flame. And troll. And partake in all manner of web rudeness.

It must be said that there are plenty of Windows users who do exactly the same thing, namely follow this sort of line-of-thought: “You use a different operating system to me. Therefore you are clearly a narrow-minded, stupid, foolish waste of space, and I am vastly superior in every way, and have every right to write the most ridiculously obscene insults about your mother”.

Well, it actually comes out more like “Mac OS rulz!!!111!one!! Micro$oft are evil, and your are a …”

It’s extraordinary. People are incredible. Although considering human nature, and the cloak of anonymity the internet provides, such base instincts aren’t too surprising, I guess.

But yesterday, I found the cream of the crop. This site was at the more measured, sane end of office suite comparisons, comparing the (free, open-source) OpenOffice.org suite to (the evil, bloated, terrible, costly) Microsoft Office. It made a number of good points, and set about showing that for most users, the free version actually works rather well for a common set of tasks. Right up until the end:

“Look, do yourself a favor and set aside the natural skepticism that comes with trying something new. You’ll thank me later. After all, 49 million downloads can’t be wrong.”

Oh, millions of people can be wrong, alright.





I just got quantifiably cooler

29 01 2007

I’ve finally stepped over. I’ve ordered a new 13″ shiny white macbook. Extra RAM too (2GB), to try and future-proof it as much as possible, since I’m not getting anything else for a long time. This will of course be my new laptop notebook. It’s kind of weird, moving to a completely new system.

Traditionally, I’ve been a computer nerd. I still am. My current laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T23, running (of all things) gentoo linux. That’s quite different from the supposed paragon of GUI glory that is OS X. I’ve been used to setting up things from the most fundamental level of kernel hacking and command line manipulation, configuring pretty much everything to the way I wanted it (or at least the bare level of functionality that I could cope with without spending 17 more days leafing through manuals). Now everything, I’m told, “just works”. Hmmm.

There’s a great set of penny arcade comics about slowly growing to love the mac (be warned about the links, ye of faint constitutions. The content/language/world view/existence of the series is a little… florid). I feel a little the same. In two weeks time, I will have progressed from declaring my hatred of mac systems (prompted largely by the fiendish filemaker database CBS used for many years) to owning two ipods and a macbook. Oh well. Three cheers for hypocrisy.

The main reasons for the switch were essentially the apps I use. I tend to use my computer to manipulate and muck around with images and audio, and for college. I’ve currently got the GIMP under both Windows and Linux for all my image editing needs, and it’s available for Mac too, under X11. If Kristy keeps doing advertising stuff for her work and church, and Adobe keep their student discount for CS3, we might get that down the track. At the moment that’s $500 we don’t need to spend though.

The other main thing is that I’m going to get Accordance for my studies. Whatever I did, in order to get powerful bible software I would have had to change my setup, either to Windows or Mac. I like the power available in Accordance, and the breadth of Bibleworks (which apparently is one of its major strengths - you can get a much wider variety of modules for it) doesn’t effect me now anyway, as I’m only concerned with English, Greek and Hebrew.

So it’s coming in just under 2 weeks. We get a (almost) free ipod with it, thanks to an educational rebate. Kristy is happy. When that happens, I’ll probably set up the laptop as a windows machine for Kristy to use when she’s teaching, and make our desktop into a linux server to keep music and image data on. I’m thinking ubuntu… I’d like to try it. But that will be a story for another day (when I get sick of playing with my shiny new mac).