More helps with unicode

I am happy to see Joe Weaks now posting some useful introductory material on unicode on his Macintosh Biblioblog

Unicode: A Bible Scholar's Introduction

I look forward to the future instalments. I took a session today in our Biblical Studies seminar on Greek fonts, and especially unicode, and pointed to some of my own links of choice on the Greek NT Gateway fonts page. I was stirred to do this having seen so many PhD theses struggling with fonts. I reckon that I have probably asked for major font corrections in the majority of theses I've examined.

Meanwhile, the interesting discussions on unicode continue over on b-greek which last night included a particularly notable contribution from Peter Kirby who has released a beta of a programme called Greek Pad, available at http://www.peterkirby.com/greekpad.zip. It's a great facility and allows you to type in Beta code and get unicode output, which you then copy and paste into your document. One of the things it has over the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter is that you can see in three columns, first the beta code keystrokes you are typing in, then the unicode that is coming out, and then the code points. Peter has also done some clever stuff to allow you to type in unaccented Greek, then hit the enter / return key and get some accenting based on stored dictionary entries. I'm not yet clear quite how the latter will pan out since it will not, presumably, be able to distinguish between different forms of given words. For example, I typed in εν αρχη ην ο λογος, pressed return and got ἐν ἀρχὴ ἣν ὁ λόγος and not Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. But it is a beta, and it's another cracking resource.