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GreekKeys 2015 is the latest revision of a custom polytonic Greek keyboard program with accompanying fonts that has long been useful to many scholars, teachers, and students of the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. GreekKeys fonts and keyboards provide easy access to many specialized characters (e.g., for metrics, epigraphy, and papyrology) that are absent from most system fonts and that would otherwise have to be entered in roundabout or obscure ways.
In modern word-processing, the characters entered are encoded in Unicode, an international standard. In order to type polytonic Greek in Unicode, two elements are needed. First, one needs fonts that contain the necessary characters. Some fonts supplied with Mac OS X or Windows OS or with software packages like MS Office (MS Word) contain the needed characters for ordinary polytonic text and some do not. GreekKeys fonts go beyond the commercial fonts because they contain specialized characters needed by scholars that are in few or no commerical fonts and because they contain precomposed characters for combinations that may be impossible or misrepresented in standard fonts (such as dotted letters, vowels that have a macron or breve as well as other diacritics, circumflex accent on omicron or epsilon). Second, one needs an easy way to input the desired characters. Again, both Mac OS X and Windows OS offer a polytonic Greek keyboard that can be enabled, but the location of the diacritics is obscure to most users. GreekKeys keyboards go beyond the standard keyboards because they cater to the needs of scholars and teachers and provide a simple-to-learn pattern of keyboard placement of diacritics.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
The Mac OS X installer requires version 10.5.x or higher. Manual installation is possible on version 10.3.x or 10.4.x.
The Windows keyboard installers have been tested in Windows 7, 8, and 10, and probably work in Windows XP as well.
The GreekKeys Unicode fonts for polytonic Greek work in Word 2004 and higher in Mac OS X and in Word 2003 and higher for Windows. OpenType substitution features in the GreekKeys Unicode fonts work in Word 2008 and higher in Mac OS X and in Word 2003 and higher for Windows.
CONTENTS OF THE DOWNLOADED PACKAGE
The download with either be a compressed ZIP archive, GreekKeys2015.zip or GreekKeys2015Rev2018.zip, or a folder with the name GreekKeys2015 or GreekKeys2015Rev2018 (if your OS automatically decompresses the ZIP archive). If your Windows system is set up not to show file extensions, you can recognize the difference by the icon: the compressed version has a zipper on the icon, the uncompressed version appears as an ordinary folder.
GK2015 Documentation is the folder containing useful documentation:
Please read the relevant QuickStart document before running the installers, especially if you are upgrading from GreekKeys 2008.
QuickStartMac.pdf and QuickStartWindows.pdf provide very brief instructions on how to install the keyboards and fonts.
GK2015UserGuide.pdf provides full instructions on how to install the keyboards and fonts and how to use them, as well as how to work around problems.
Subfolder GK2105 Keyboard Charts Mac contains PDFs with keyboard charts showing the layout of the various keyboards, including the Unicode code point of the character on each key.
Subfolder GK2105 Keyboard Charts Windows contains PDFs with keyboard charts showing the layout of the various keyboards, including the Unicode code point of the character on each key.
Subfolder GK2015 Licenses contains the various licenses applying to the keyboards and the fonts in the package.
ArchiveToCDInstructions.pdf tells you how to create an archive CD [if that is your chosen backup method for your download] on either platform that will be readable on both platforms.
GK2015 Mac Installer is the folder containing the single Mac OS X installer and related items:
Standard Mac OS X installer package named GK2015Mac.pkg.
An Automator app RevealGKUbundles.app that, if applicable, will open in the Finder the folder or folders where the 2008 version of the keyboards has been installed.
An Automator app RevealGKFonts.app that, if applicable, will open in the Finder the folder or folders where any versions of the GreekKeys fonts have been installed.
Subfolder GK2015 Mac Bundles contains the components needed for manual installation and should not be needed by most users.
GK2015 Windows Installers is the folder containing keyboard installers for Windows:
Nine subfolders contain the nine separate installers for localized GKU2015 keyboards (each user will normally run only one of the nine) and two subfolders contain installers for two keyboards to input special symbols used by Greek scholars.
GK2105 Font Files is the folder containing the fonts:
Subfolder NAU5_002 contains the freeware font New Athena Unicode in four versions—regular, italic, bold, bold italic; a document detailing the revision history of the font (AboutNAUfont_v5_002.pdf).
Subfolder OtherSCSFonts contains the licensed (not freeware) fonts AttikaU, KadmosU, BosporosU, each in four versions—regular, italic, bold, bold italic. Also present is the document SCSFontsRevisionHistory.pdf.
Two documents that will help find specific characters in the font New Athena Unicode: FindCharacterNAU.pdf and NAU5cmap.txt.
Note that fonts must be installed manually under Windows. The default under OS X is that the fonts are installed as part of the Standard Install option in the GK2015Mac Installer. Manual installation is also possible in OS X if a user has a particular reason to prefer manual installation.