Monday, 27 April 2020

Greek and Hebrew Keyboards in Windows 10

Logos provides ancient language keyboards for Windows PCs.  

They are homophonic (i.e. the Hebrew letters are mapped to the nearest English sounding keys in a standard QWERTY keyboard).

When they work, they make typing Biblical Greek and Hebrew much more easy. 

But after updating to Windows 10 Build 1909, the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard disappears (I don't use the Greek one, so I can't vouch as to whether the same behaviour occurs there). 

The standard Hebrew keyboard uses the mapping from an original Hebrew typewriter. 

After trying various combinations of adding/removing the Hebrew language pack, the other standard Hebrew keyboards and the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard, I got it back on two desktops and my ThinkPad X1 Tablet (Gen 1) but I couldn't get it to come back on a ThinkPad T430.

A workaround:  Use the SBL biblical hebrew and greek keyboards instead.  They can be downloaded from here.

Both the SBL and Logos keyboards support accents, cantillations and vowel points. 

Another better workaround:  I like to use the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard, which uses the same maps as the deprecated Shibboleth app mapping.  

You can create your own keyboard using the Microsoft Keyboard creator.  Instructions here.