Ever wanted to type a Greek accent or Hebrew vowel point and been unsure how to do it? Accordance now includes six fonts: Helena (Greek), Yehudit (Hebrew), Rosetta (Transliteration), MSS (all those weird symbols you see in critical apparatuses), Sylvanus (Uncial Greek), and Peshitta (Syriac). Keyboard layouts and complete instructions for using these fonts can be found in the Accordance Fonts pdf located in the Manuals & Documents folder inside your Accordance folder, but who wants to open a pdf just to be able to enter a Gothic P in a user note? That's where the new Character Palette in version 7.1 comes in handy.
When you select Character Palette from the Window menu, a new floating palette will appear showing every character in the selected Accordance font:
A pop-up menu lets you choose the font you want to work with, and a series of checkboxes along the top let you show or hide certain types of characters. For example, I've been using Accordance long enough to know all the Greek letters and Hebrew consonants, so I don't need help knowing where those characters are on the keyboard. By unchecking those items, I streamline the palette so that it takes up less screen real estate and shows me just the stuff I still need help with (such as accents, vowel points, and cantillation marks.)
Whenever you're in a text entry field or edit window, clicking a character on the palette will insert that character at the insertion point. If you hover over a character on the palette a little tip will appear showing you the name of the character along with the keyboard keys used to enter it. In this way, the palette teaches you how to enter the characters you use most. It also helps the beginning student remember which grouping of dots in Hebrew is a "sere" and which is a "segol"!
The Character Palette is a very flexible new tool which can make working with the original languages, transliteration, and text-critical symbols much easier.
# posted by David Lang @ 9:45 AM
