Multilingual Dictionary Software
Multilingual FontsKeyboards
All the keyboards listed below are freeware for non-commercial use. (Commercial users are invited to make a small donation to my university, not to me.)
The
This version includes the ability to type Combining Diacritic characters (including some that cross two letters) as well as Non-Breaking Space, ZWJ, ZWNJ and other "invisible" characters. Those are strictly for the cognoscenti, because of the danger of accidentally typing something that could cause confusion later.
The documentation is rather wordy, because it includes a handout explaining the whole issue of entering "unusual" characters, from first principles. The last few pages are specific to UK Enhanced.
I would be happy to hear from anyone interested in testing similar enhanced versions of other national keyboard layouts, especially the US one.
Here
is the short version of the instructions for how to use UK Enhanced: The
Quick
Guide to Typing Latin-Alphabet Languages
Here is a much longer document that covers all the main methods of entering "non-standard" characters in Latin-alphabet languages: How To Type Text in Languages That Use the Latin Alphabet.doc
Recent versions of the Cyrillic Enhanced keyboard have been renamed Russian Enhanced keyboard, which is more accurate and prevents it coming first alphabetically and accidentally becoming the default keyboard. This layout can be used to type almost all the Cyrillic-alphabet languages (not, alas, Komi: I'm working on that) in Unicode with a single keyboard-layout.
It is based on the standard Russian national keyboard layout, using additional "dead keys" to produce accented and special characters. The documentation is still primitive: I will produce more detailed information when time permits.
If anyone needs Combining Diacritic characters to be added to Russian Enhanced, please contact me.
Here is the latest version of the Greek Enhanced keyboard. This is a superset of the Modern Greek layout that adds the ability to type all the accents, diacritics and breathings used in Ancient Greek. This layout is intended to be more ergonomic and easier to memorize than Microsoft's Greek Polytonic layout. It uses dead keys to avoid having to hold down several keys simultaneously and places the commonest diacritics on keys that are easily reachable by the first and second fingers. It uses the Caps Lock to handle iota subscripts.
The document How To Handle Greek Text in Windows was written for Windows XP, but the layout has not changed since then, so this document is still useful.
International
Phonetic Alphabet
A similar freeware layout for typing IPA is available, but currently
lacks
documentation. If anyone is interested, please contact me.
Fonts
LeedsUni
The latest version of the LeedsUni
freeware
font, compatible with version 2.0 of the Medieval Unicode
Font Inititative
(MUFI), as well as the latest version of
Unicode, is available here LeedsUni
Latest.zip.
Anyone who needs specific characters that are currently missing
from Unicode, especially those used in medieval languages, is
invited to
visit the MUFI pages here: http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/mufi/
Documents
This is a quick-and-dirty description of how to set up Windows XP to work with Chinese text Chinese on XP.doc . The same technique works with Japanese, Korean etc.
This is a Word for Windows macro to find the code-number of any particular character: What Is That Character.doc
This is a Word for Windows macro to display all the characters in a particular font, in a table, with each character in one square of the table, together with its code number: Show All Characters In The Font in a Table.doc
Stuart
Legg's document: How
to
add
languages and have them STAY THERE.htm explains how to
make changes to XP's
language settings that seem to survive SYSPREP's infuriating habit of
resetting
such things to default values.
I have developed a number of other macros for converting text between
various
different encodings (e.g. WinGreek
to Unicode).
Anyone interested is invited to contact me.