Polytonic Greek on Windows XP

Nathan mentioned having some difficulty finding all the Greek words he needed,  and copying, when writing on the computer. To that, I mentioned using the keyboard layout with Windows. There are a number of good posts for this out there on the web, but I’ve combined it all in one place…

Here are the instructions for configuring/using the Polytonic Greek keyboard:

1. In the Windows XP standard Start menu, click Start, and then click Control Panel. In the Windows XP classic Start menu, click Start, click Settings, and then click Control Panel.
2. Double-click Regional and Language Options.
3. Click the Languages tab, and then click Details under “Text Services and Input Languages”.
4. Select “Greek” as the input language.
5. Click Add under “Installed Services”, and then select “Greek Polytonic” from the Keyboard Layout/IME combo-box.
6. To configure the settings for the Language bar, click Language Bar under “Preferences”. More specifically, this will allow turning on the language bar on the desktop. (It will show in the taskbar). As well, you can setup key press combinations to toggle input languages.
7. Now that the keyboard is installed properly, you can hit the “EN” on your taskbar. (You may have to right click on the taskbar first, select Toolbars > Language bar). This should pop up a list of keyboard input methods. Once you have changed to “Greek”, you can hit the keyboard next to “EL” and select the keyboard layout, if you added more keyboards to Greek than just the Polytonic.
8. You’re off!

Now, with that out of the way, here are some of the rules for keyboard operation:

• The vowels and consonants of Greek are best described visually for the keyboard.
• For all diacritics, type the key code for the diacritic, then the character receiving the diacritic:
  

  Character	Plain	Shift	Alt	Alt+Shift
  ‘ (single-tick)	ἀ	ἁ	ᾀ	ᾁ
  ; (semi-colon)	ά	ϊ	ΐ	Ν/Α
  [	ᾶ	ᾳ	ᾷ	Ν/Α
  ]	ὰ	N/A	ᾲ	·
  - (hyphen)	ᾱ	ᾰ	±	Ν/Α
  =	ἆ	ἇ	ᾆ	ᾇ
  	ἂ	ἃ	ᾂ	ᾃ
  /	ἄ	ἅ	ᾄ	ᾅ

I hope this helps.