Visual Keyboard for Original Languages

David Thomas said:

When I downloaded the Greek and Hebrew keyboards from Logos then unzipped the download. In each unzipped folder was a PDF with instructions. At the end of the PDF is an image of the keyboard. I printed and laminated those images.

While the keyboards are for free, it appears that Logos sells a mouse pad with the keyboard maps.

BTW: Thank you for mentioning the Logos keyboards.  I have distributed the link to our Greek learning group and others.

https://www.logos.com/support/logos5/windows/keyboards

I'm not sure about the Windows 8.x OS, but in Windows 7 the onscreen keyboard shows the Greek / Hebrew keyboard when the cursor is located in the language text.

David Thomas said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the mousepad lists keyboard shortcuts for the Logos program and not the keyboard map for biblical language characters.

You're right.  I didn't read it correctly.

TCBlack said:

David A Egolf said:

O.K. George.  I give up.  What do you mean by "located in the language text"? I'm in Windows 7 and was unable to see an onscreen keyboard. 

In windows click start and type OSK, click the entry osk.exe that comes up, this will load the On Screen keyboard.

The Language bar is a menu you can enable on your taskbar or on the desktop, by following the instructions in the PDF's referred to above. (Or hit MS help for "Language bar").

You can SWITCH languages by typing ALT+SHIFT (by default), when you do so in a text entry field such as a word processor, or a web browser text box, etc the OSK will alter to show the active language.  

Thank you ,TC.  That worked.  They should add that information to the pdf.

I seem to have a Windows 7 problem.  At first, the onscreen keyboard toggled faithfully with <ALT>-<SHIFT>.  Now the hot keys do not reliably change the On-Screen version.  However, fortunately, my actual keyboard is responding to <ALT>-<SHIFT>.  For instance, while I type this paragraph the On-Screen Keyboard is displaying Greek letters rather than the English character set.  If it does this often, then it isn't going to be terribly useful when I choose to type Greek.

TCBlack said:

It may be a refresh issue on the keyboard, you may occasionally have to click onto it (titlebar) and then back into your document.  I think it's a windows OSK bug rather than anything else.

It gets worse!  Last night at our Greek group meeting I was setting up to demonstrate the Logos Greek keyboard.  I opened MS Word in order to have a place to type.  I then opened the Windows Start menu in order to get to the onscreen control panel.  When I typed OSK, it came out in Greek letters.  But I had NOT activated the Greek keyboard and demonstrated that by typing English in Word.

Once I got everything set up, the onscreen keyboard again did not follow the current key settings.  It tended to stick to English even though I was typing Greek into my sample Word document.