Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 18/01/2006 20:16, Paul Rembach wrote:

> ...
>
> After reinstalling Keyman and various keyboards, the font size problem
> vanished but another input issue surfaced.  Fortunately the answer to this
> was found in the document 'Biblical Hebrew(SIL) keyboard manual' that is
> part of the SIL Ezra font package where it states:
>
> ...
>
> So.  OpenOffice as suggested by Herman Meester or upgrade to
> MSOffice/Word2003.  Notepad can be used but even it is not perfect  when
> working with already existing multi language text.
>
>  
It seems to me that this is a specific problem with this one keyboard. 
And that is found because this keyboard uses particular combinations of 
keys, probably mostly for input of Hebrew accents and other rare marks.

This is unlikely to be a problem with David Perry's Hebrew keyboard (see 
http://scholarsfonts.net/keybrds.html), which doesn't use strange 
keyboard combinations, and which four years after the release of the 
beta version still distributed still has accents "not yet implemented, 
except for the three above" (munah, ole and atnahta, for some odd 
reason). The following note is also still current after 3½ years:

> Note 7/24/02:  The Hebrew keyboard was originally created while I was 
> running Windows 98.  Since moving to Windows XP, I have discovered 
> some bugs.  It will be a while before I can fix it.  When I do, I will 
> post the information here.

This suggests this Hebrew keyboard is in fact not being supported, which 
is a shame as it has many advantages, and as the best alternative I know 
of seems to be the SIL keyboard which displays the bugs.

But it would be about an hour's work for someone to develop a simple 
MSKLC keyboard (for Windows 2000/XP) supporting biblical Hebrew (with a 
transliteration encoding) excluding accents, which could then be widely 
and freely distributed and solve the problem. Has anyone actually done this?

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/