Morganically Grown

Typography is a keyboard layout designed to make glyph entry easier and more intuitive in Mac OS X. Rather than mapping characters strictly to Option and Shift-Option strokes, which creates arbitrary and non-mnemonic mappings, Typography uses “modes” to group like characters together, opening up the keyboard to a theoretically unlimited number of glyphs, while significantly enhancing usability.

Features:

• Number pad diacritic entry
• Natural ligature & letterform entry
• Full quotation mark set (including high-reversed-9 and low-9)
• Natural vulgar fraction entry
• Full sets of spaces, joiners, dots, and dashes
• Number pad arrows set with harpoons and single-stroke, double-stroke, and multidirectional arrows
• Full set of symbols
• Full Greek upper and lowercase sets
• Unicode Roman numerals
• Full Unicode superscripts & subscripts
• Full Unicode currency set
• Extended mathematical symbols set
• Mac OS keyboard glyph set

Usage

Typography goes in /Library/Keyboard Layouts (for system-wide availability) or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts (for user availability). After you’ve placed it there, log out and log back in again, then enable Typography in System Preferences → International → Input Menu. Be sure Show input menu in menu bar is selected so that you can switch between layouts when necessary.

To get acquainted with Typography, you may want to explore it using Keyboard Viewer (Tiger & Panther) or Key Caps (Jaguar).

• Keyboard Viewer is located in the Input Menu in Tiger & Panther. Enable it in System Preferences → International → Input Menu, then open it by selecting Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input Menu.
• Key Caps is located in /Applications/Utilities in Jaguar.

I’ve found TextEdit to be quite useful for testing the layout. Try it with the font size bumped up so you can see the characters in all their glory.

Compatibility

Typography has been tested on Mac OS X versions 10.4.2 (Tiger) and 10.3.9 (Panther). It should work in 10.2 (Jaguar) as well, although I no longer have a version to test on, so I’d appreciate feedback from Jaguar users to confirm this.

Note that in order to use this layout in an application, the application must support Unicode keyboard layouts. Among the applications that are known to support Unicode layouts:

• Photoshop CS
• Illustrator CS ¹
• InDesign CS
• GoLive CS (Source view)
• Mac OS X built-in apps in 10.3.9 and 10.4.2
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Office 2004
• NeoOffice/J
• Dreamweaver MX 2004

¹ There is a known issue with Illustrator CS & CS2 command key sequences not working with Unicode keyboard layouts. Other than that, though, it works fine.

License

Typography is released under the GPL. Donations are gladly accepted
through PayPal.

Feedback

I’d love to hear your feedback. Please email me or post a comment below with questions, comments or feature requests.

To Do

More features I’m thinking about or planning to implement in future revisions:

• Get control keys (Backspace/Delete, Return, Arrow Keys) to retain sticky modes and still work properly
• Phonetic symbols
• Expanded diacritical set
• Dingbats set
• Polytonic Greek input
• Grade 1 Braille entry
• A couple of remaining Roman numerals
• Harpoons from Supplemental Arrows-A and -B (not contained in any default OS X fonts yet)
• Cyrillic entry (?)

Change Log

1.0 – October 15, 2005

Initial revision.

This page was created on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 6:33 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.