Typing Greek Letters on the Mac
April 6th, 2007I asked a question on the wonderful Mac site Macintouch about multiple keyboards and multiple input languages. Basically, I want to be able to easily switch between typing Greek and English. There were some excellent responses, one in particular which had a link which led me to a little Googling, and man, are there some great resources out there.
A nice thing about Macs is they are Unicode-ready (Windows probably is now, too, but I’m not as familiar with it). Unicode is a “format” which allows for a huge number of possible “letters”; far more than we normally use. But in order to type these characters on a regular keyboard, you need key combinations; like hitting shift-4 to get a dollar sign.
Well, here’s my “something back” to the vast I-want-to-type-Greek-on-my-Mac community.
Setting up your Mac
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > International > Input Menu and check the checkbox for “Greek Polytonic”. For me, that gives me two active Keyboard Layouts “U.S” and “Greek Polytonic”.
Then under “Input Menu Shortcuts,” set a Keyboard Shortcut for “Select next input source from menu”. You will use this shortcut to switch between the two layouts. I use option-space.
Also, choose “Allow a different input source for each document” under “Input source options.” This is really nice; it does just what it says.
Last, check “Show input menu in menu bar.” It is convenient to know what keyboard you’re in. This will show you a little flag in your menu bar.
Get a Good Font
Macs and PCs ship will a few fonts built in. Old-timers Times and Arial are among them. Recent versions are aware of Unicode and have a lot, but not all, of the special characters. There are some other free Greek fonts around. I like Gentium. Download and install by double-clicking the font and choosing install, or by opening Font Book and choosing the Gentium folder.
Print My Cheat Sheet
To type Greek characters, you’ll need to use special key combinations. It will be a while before you have them memorized, so Mac users please feel free to download my little cheat sheet here.
Take Her for a Spin
Now, it goes like this:
- option-space
- start typing καί θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος
- option-space to get back to your normal keyboard
- send me great piles of money
That’s it! I hope that helps someone get started quickly. If you see any errors or something that it would be useful to add, please let me know in the comments.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Oh dude, you rock. You rock a lot. I’ve been workin on a project for a Greek event on my campus. Greek sing. Every other letter I could just pluck from a site and insert it into my motion projects. Except for SIGMA for some reason. I’d copy it. paste it, it’d be in the inspector box, but never show up. Thank you. I’m a college kid, so I can’t send you money, and its almost two years since you posted it, but thank you.
December 30th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Thank you very much for this post. You just to bring to an end a mild panic attack I was having. See, about an hour ago, I popped all of the keys off of my Mac keyboard in order to clean several years worth of gunk and grime out of there. But, when I put them back on and tested out the keys to make sure they worked, all of the text I typed came out in strange symbols. It took me a minute (and several futile minutes spent googling terms like “mac keyboard troubleshooting” and looking at the Apple online store to see how much a new keyboard costs) to realize that it was Greek lettering. My next search, “mac keyboard greek letters” brought me here and I was able to correct the problem. So, again, thank you for this post. It was immensely helpful, though perhaps not for the reasons you intended.
July 10th, 2010 at 12:29 am
Great hint, I was wondering if there are greek letters in fonts like Times new roman too?
November 28th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I use a lot of Greek letters for my mathematical papers. You just made my life exponentially easier. Pun intended ;-)
March 7th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Awesome - thank you. Very helpful, and quite the “lifesaver”!
April 9th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Thanks. There are some Greek letters in some of the basic fonts, but it’s generally not a complete set… at least not with Koine’s accents and such.
April 19th, 2011 at 11:46 am
Sicknessssssssssssssssssssssss. Thanks a load sir! Or should i say, Τηανκσ α λοαδ σιρ!