Greek (polytonic) keyboard in Ubuntu 16.04

Greek Learning Greek
1

I set up my Linux system to type Greek polytonic characters. It’s Ubuntu 16.04, Unity desktop environment, the default. My locale is set to “en_US.UTF-8”; my physical keyboard is an ordinary American keyboard. Here is what I did, expressed as instructions.

Find “System Settings”, and click on “Text Entry”.

Go to “Input sources to use”, and click “+”

Find “Greek (polytonic)” and select it.

Choose keys for switching input sources. My system has two input sources, “English (US)” and “Greek (polytonic)”. I use Control+/ to change input sources.

Fiddle with the other choices to decide what you want.

This web page will show you how to key in the Greek characters using the typical American keyboard:
https://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/viewtopic.php?t=759

I have not tested every key, but the ones that I have tested match the web page.

2

There’s a useful link on using Greek fonts with linux here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oiK5KraVvob6fAEhcVjwI99RlWtnBLiSGgDFs96qrbk/preview

3

David’s page on the Greek keyboard in Ubuntu is in Greek. LOL

4

Needless to say, the page shown has nothing to do with setting up a Greek keyboard in Linux! It’s probably from a tax FAQ on alternate ways of providing tax documentation on sales from gas stations of liquid fuels to businesses (to obtain a rebate)

5

That’s not the original text. It looks like a bad copy-paste. I’ve left a document comment.

6

FWIW, since I posted this, I have decided that I prefer to type polytonic Greek in Emacs, using the Emacs input method greek-ibycus4. You can have lots of files open in Emacs, but when you set an input-method, it is active only in the buffer(file) you are using when you set the input method. All the other buffers (files) remain as they were as far as keyboard input is concerned.

I don’t type much Greek. I do a lot of Greek handwriting, for example copying sentences into a notebook for parsing and for grammar study.

7

As long as we’re necroposting, here’s what I do on my linux box:

setxkbmap 'us,gr' -variant ',polytonic' -option 'grp:win_menu_switch'

After this command, the left windows key puts me in US mode, while the right windows key puts me in polytonic Greek.

Here’s the resulting keyboard layout:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_layouts#Greek_el

Accents work like this:

; acute accent
’ grave accent
[ circumflex
: smooth breathing
" rough breathing
] iota subscript
{ diaresis

When combining these you have to type the accent before the breathing.