GreekKeys Credits

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GreekKeys Unicode comprises three elements. The first is a set of inputs for Mac OS X developed from 2002 onwards and officially released with GreekKeys 2005 in late 2004. In developing several of the non-US inputs I received recommendations, information, and help with testing from several scholars, whom I wish to thank here: Adam Bülow-Jacobsen, Marie-Gabrielle Guérard, Ralph Hancock, Henning Lühken, Juan-José Marcos, Nick Nicholas, Maria Pantelia, Richard Peevers, Lucia Prauscello, Daniel Riaño, Pim Rietbroek. The inputs were slightly revised for GreekKeys 2008, and experimental sets of inputs for partially and fully decomposed input were added.

The second element is a set of keyboards for Windows XP and Vista. After not fully successful experiments a few years earlier, in 2007 I developed the set of keyboards, now released with GreekKeys 2008, using version 1.4 of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. These keyboards are very close in arrangement and functionality to the Mac OS X inputs. I am very grateful to Michael Kaplan of Microsoft Windows International Division for his contribution to that program and for information.

The third element is a set of APA Unicode fonts containing the characters needed for polytonic Greek and other specialized needs of scholars of the ancient Greco-Roman world. For several years I have been expanding and improving New Athena Unicode font to take account of expansions of the Unicode standard and the emerging capacity of applications to take advantage of smart font features such as ligatures. After the donation of Kadmos and Bosporos to the APA, I also developed KadmosU and BosporosU, as well as AttikaU.

During my work on the fonts, advice and help have been generously provided by members of Apple's Font Group (Deborah Goldsmith, Lee Collins, Peter Lofting); by Maria Pantelia, Nick Nicholas, and Richard Peevers of TLG; by Ralph Hancock (author of the Antioch input schemes and fonts for Windows) and Juan-José Marcos (author of the ALPHABETUM font) and Kamal Mansour of Monotype Imaging; and by Dr. Deborah Anderson of the Script Encoding Initiative. Lee Collins of Apple has been especially generous in answering my queries over several years, and it with great regret that I have removed the Apple Advanced Typography features from the GreekKeys 2008 versions of the APA fonts.

I am not a professional font designer, and most of my computer knowledge is at the level of the minimum needed to move forward with what I want to accomplish. There are various imperfections in the fonts (some due to their history, some due to me, and some due to weaknesses of the software I have used), and compromises have been made in the interest of practicality (especially in the use of Private Use Area [=PUA] encoding) and inclusiveness (some glyphs are included whose use I would not myself endorse). For these shortcomings and other errors that may be detected, the responsibility is mine.

My work on GreekKeys Unicode has also depended on some excellent software: in particular, FontLab Studio 5 for Mac OS X, BBEdit 8.x from BareBones Software, Apple FontToolsX, and Apple Developer Tools.

Traditional GreekKeys was invented in 1984 by George B. Walsh, to help students and teachers of ancient Greek type Greek fonts and accents on the Apple Macintosh 128K. He died in February of 1989, while Associate Professor of Classics and Department Chairman at the University of Chicago. His wife, Susan M. Kastendiek, donated GreekKeys to the American Philological Association. Subsequent editions have changed in many ways from his first version, yet its design is still essentially his own. (Earlier names of the product, no longer used, were SMK and SMK GreekKeys.)

GreekKeys was maintained and upgraded through 2001 by Jeffrey Rusten (Cornell University), with assistance from numerous other scholars. In 2001 I undertook maintenance and revision in order to help GreekKeys survive the transition to OS X and to Unicode.

The 1991 edition added several new fonts (Athenian, Symbol Athenian, Classical) and support for TrueType, as well as a new keyboard arrangement (GreekKeys Universal), which was the recommended arrangement, as it involves almost no inconveniences for typing in Roman fonts, and this pattern later served as the pattern for GreekKeys Unicode.

The 1995 edition introduced compatible fonts for Windows 3.1 and a keyboard program from Windows, but Windows support was phased out in 1999 because of changes in later versions of Windows and Microsoft Word for Windows. Now in 2008 has Windows support returned.

Donald Mastronarde

Danish translation of the page About GreekKeys Unicode provided by Nastasya Zemina.