Type Greek and the Sublinear Dot

If you want a speedy and efficient way to type unicode Greek, Type Greek.com is a fantastic web based option. I recommended Type Greek on the blog back in April 2007 and I have had a link to it on the Greek NT Gateway fonts page since then. I was struggling recently with sublinear dots (the little dots you put under letters when doing textual criticism to show that it is uncertain) and wondered whether Type Greek might have that option. It didn't so I asked Randy Hoyt whether it might be possible for this feature to be added. Ask and you shall receive! Now if you hit the @ key, your sublinear dot is added, just like that.

Greek Bible Study

I'm grateful to Sarah Madden for alerting me to a fine new site for working with the Greek New Testament and Septuagint:

Greek Bible Study
Anonymous site. Excellent, colour-coded Greek New Testament (Tischendorf) and Septuagint, with mouse-over Thayer word definitions (long and short), word studies, notes facilities and more. Unicode fonts, good search facilities, and a graduated reader based on William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek.

I've added a link high up on my Greek New Testament Texts (test) page since those pages will soon be integrated into the site. (More soon).

New New Testament Gateway Prototype

Over the last few months, I have been doing some serious thinking about the future of the New Testament Gateway. I have outlined what I see as shortcomings in the past, so I won't repeat them here. I am now ready to float a solution. This solution involves using Blogger as my CMS (Content Management System), which has several advantages over the static HTML pages that have made up the New Testament Gateway for the last (almost) decade. In particular, it allows me to add other contributors to the site who can straightforwardly edit and update pages. But it also makes it much easier for me to maintain the site, and adds additional functionality like RSS feeds throughout, commenting facility and so on.

In an earlier post, I said that I was looking to add some wiki functionality to the site. Several people balked at this because it might potentially take away from the strength and identity of the site. I have listened to those comments and think that my current solution enables me to have the best of both worlds, to remain as director of the site and yet to add several experts in particular places.

I spent a lot of time exploring different ways that I might rework the New Testament Gateway, and I am grateful for the help of a group of people that I consulted about it (Zeth Green, Jonathan Robie, Danny Zacharias, Brandon Wason and Rick Brannan; also, separately, Stephen Carlson). Although, in the end, the decision to experiment with blogger has been my own decision, discussing the site with others was very helpful in clarifying what it was that I wanted to do.

Although I am using Blogger as my CMS for the prototype, most users will not realize. The look will be familiar; I have adapted the template I use for this blog but have integrated some elements from the current New Testament Gateway. Those familiar with the New Testament Gateway should find it easy to navigate. So far, I am just testing the site with the Greek New Testament Gateway, and that is the only part of the old site that I have ported over to the new format:

Greek New Testament Gateway (test)

Therefore the new version is contained within the links at the top of each page; the links in the side bar still take one to the old versions of the site.

Some brief notes:

(1) I have not yet edited any of the content. As soon as I am happy with the prototype, I will begin editing content, and inviting others to help. At this stage, we are just looking at design and function.

(2) Ultimately, the main URLs of the site will remain in tact, so NTGateway.com will still take one to the main page of the site (which will be redesigned, but more on that anon), NTGateway.com/greek will take one to the Greek New Testament Gateway and so on. The third layer of links, e.g. NTGateway.com/greek/fonts.htm, will, however, change because of the way that I am using blogger.

(3) As part of the redesign, I will be retiring certain parts of the old site. This will include the Bookshelves, and one or two other parts of the site that have fallen into disrepair. I will keep the related site, All-in-One Biblical Resources search, on-line but will not be integrating links to it in the new version, since it's now long in the tooth and technology has overtaken what it was doing well back in 2000 or so.

(4) One useful thing to come out of the consultations was that it became clear that while I have a clear idea of what "The New Testament Gateway" proper is, I have not always communicated that very well. Let me clarify that I think of The New Testament Gateway as the annotated directory of internet resources that are listed on the main page at NTGateway.com. The All-in-One Biblical Resources Search was a sister site, and the NTGateway Weblog is a companion blog. There are other materials hosted at NTGateway.com that are just that, materials hosted in that domain, but not part of the gateway.

I would be very grateful for your feedback. If this test version works OK, I will begin to re-jig the entire site.

Type Greek

I've added a link to a fine new resource on my Greek Fonts page:

Type Greek
By Randy Hoyt: a very useful tool, describing itself as "a web-based software tool that converts text from a standard keyboard into beautiful, polytonic Greek characters as you type. Using an easy-to-learn and standardized system called beta code, TypeGreek converts your keystrokes into Unicode-compliant Greek in real-time."

If you are not yet typing in unicode, this may be just what you are looking for. It behaves in the same way as the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter by James Naughton, which has often been mentioned on this blog (see all my entries on Unicode).

One minor comment: I find that the iota subscript only works if I am using a standard US keyboard, so to get it to work on my current computers, I have to switch to a US keyboard from my default UK keyboard. My guess is that that is a peculiarity of using a US PC with a UK keyboard, so this issue may be unique to the tiny set of people like me. (And if you want to know why I use a UK keyboard, it's because the @ is in a different place; likewise inverted commas and the £ symbol; years of touch typing on a UK keyboard makes the switch to US difficult).

Sorting Unicode Greek in MS Word

Steven Craig Miller has written a great little macro to facilitate sorting in MS Word a list of accented Greek words in Greek alphabetical order. I offered to host it here on the NT Gateway, and have added a link on the NT Greek Computer Software page, to the following effect:

Sorting Unicode Greek in MS Word [Zip archive]
By Steven Craig Miller. Click on the link to download a macro which facilitates sorting in MS Word a list of accented Greek words in Greek alphabetical order. Instructions on how to use the macro and exactly what it does is in a PDF file, while the macro itself is in a text file entitled "ConvertUnicodeGreek2Uppercase". For security reasons, a copy of the macro is also in the PDF file. This archive is hosted here at the NT Gateway, but if you have any questions, please e-mail the author of the macro at: stevencraigmiller@comcast.net.

Oh, and while I was at it, I updated all the links on that page too.