For those projects that find themselves using special characters, it may be helpful to create a custom keyboard.

Of course, OCHRE has a built it keyboard if you use special characters only occasionally. To access the Text formatting tool, click the F icon on the toolbar, then click the Keyboard tool icon. From there you can choose the Keypad and Language to use.

However, clicking the special characters in this keypad can be time consuming, particularly if you are entering transliterated text. In this case, it is faster to customize your computer's keyboard with a parallel language input. Note the special characters in the following Ugaritic keyboard. The three "dots" on the 1, 2, and 3 keys are actually the Ugaritic alephs , , and . Please take care to map the keyboard to meaningful Unicode characters so your special characters will translate to all Unicode fonts.

There is no need to duplicate the the detailed explanation of how to create such a keyboard. For instructions on creating Windows keyboards, see the following article on the Microsoft website:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx

You can create custom keyboards for Mac OS with the free utility called Ukelele. Read about this application on the SIL website. Mac OS comes with a U.S. Extended keyboard that allows for quick entry of diacritics as well. However, some users will find it more efficacious to use a highly customized keyboard. We have created customized Mac keyboard layouts for Demotic and Hittite users at the Oriental Institute. See the discussion of the Gentium font where you will find fonts and keyboard layouts to download.