Hello all,
I’ve created an experimental HTML document which will automagically convert ASCII keyboard input within its <textarea> into Unicode classical Greek characters; the keyboard mapping is identical to that of the SPIonic typeface. The goal of this experiment is that the classical Greek text entered within the <textarea> can be cut/copied/pasted to other browser windows — or to any application that supports Unicode text. The benefit of the experiment is that the generated text is storable and retrievable as classical Greek, as opposed to SPIonic text, whose Greekness is only a façade on its ASCII foundation.
The document requires active ECMAScript/JavaScript with support for certain DOM Level 2 interfaces to function, and the freely available Gentium and Cardo typefaces are recommended to display the document in its current incarnation [links to the typefaces can be found in the document]. Although DOM Level 2 is a vendor-neutral requirement, my initial testing on Windows 98 revealed that Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 7.23 don’t seem to support the DOM Level 2 Core. However, Mozilla 1.6 does seem to work. I haven’t tried other versions of these browsers, or the same versions on different operating systems, so I’m interested in discovering what works where.
One planned enhancement is the addition of automatic conversion of the text to use precomposed characters where possible, which will make most letters with multiple diacritics look much better. Another (lower priority) planned enhancement is to support user-specifiable typefaces and -sizes within the <textarea>.
For those of you who’d like to give the document a try, I’d appreciate it if you would post a reply with your impressions — where does the document need to be improved? Would you like to see alternative enhancements?
Thanks for your feedback!
xn
experimental SPIonic-style classical Greek keyboard entry
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I'll try it in a couple of Days.
Right now I use Microsoft applications (yes I know they're evil), along with Tavultsoft's Keyman and the "classical Greek" keyboard from Manual Lopez. I love it. However, I've had a glitch in one new Computer (my fault I'm sure).
I don't really understand the need for these kind of converters since I don't have any trouble entering unicode. Nonetheless, the faster we can get the world on unicode the better off we are.
Right now I use Microsoft applications (yes I know they're evil), along with Tavultsoft's Keyman and the "classical Greek" keyboard from Manual Lopez. I love it. However, I've had a glitch in one new Computer (my fault I'm sure).
I don't really understand the need for these kind of converters since I don't have any trouble entering unicode. Nonetheless, the faster we can get the world on unicode the better off we are.
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