let's talk Greek kai symbol

John Savard

Andreas Stötzner said:

Wouldn’t it be also neccessary to approach some keyboard standardization body which coordinates between several producers of hardware?

Of course, one reason the battle was lost originally, with the need to catch up now, is that the Greek kai symbol is not included in ISO 8859-7.

But as for keyboards, while some standardization bodies have on occasion issued standards for keyboards, this has not yet risen to the level of a systematic effort.

John Hudson

@John Hudson, thank you for acting on this. Wouldn’t it be also neccessary to approach some keyboard standardization body which coordinates between several producers of hardware?

Keyboard hardware is pretty generic at the lower level, so unless one wanted a keyboard with a designated kai printed key—which would probably imply a custom driver anyway—, hardware is irrelevant.

National standards bodies, if they define keyboard layouts, tend to only care about the default and shift state layout, and often don’t specify anything for the alt and alt_shift states. So what industry produces are layouts that follow e.g. US standard QWERTY layout for default and shift state, but implement a lot of additional options in the alt and alt+shift states (e.g. the Mac Roman keyboard).

In Windows, some keyboard drivers even distinguish between the left and right alt keys, with the latter actually known as AltGr (alt Greek) for historical reasons.

Let’s be clear: what we can reasonably ask companies like Apple and Microsoft to do is to add the Greek kai characters (and maybe the numeric koppa that is still used in Greek legal documents?) to the alt and alt+shift states of their Greek keyboards. It isn’t realistic to expect that they will e.g. replace the Latin ampersand in the shift state, because that would break long-established user expectations.

Thomas Phinney

Andreas Stötzner said:

@John Hudson, thank you for acting on this. Wouldn’t it be also neccessary to approach some keyboard standardization body which coordinates between several producers of hardware?

Does such a body exist?

It has long been the case that for “special” characters there are differences between platforms. Even the US English keyboard is different between Mac and Windows, mostly because Apple offers so many additional directly-keyed characters via the Option key. Sure, the marked characters are identical, but there are platform-specific additional characters. This would be another such, at least on Mac.

John Hudson

Both Apple and Microsoft now have now open issues on adding kai support to system keyboard layouts for Greek.

Laurence Penney

Of course there’s also the matter of support in system fonts. Unfortunately neither SF Pro nor New York contains kai (lc or uc). I imagine Apple regards support in system fonts as a precondition for keyboard support.

Regarding the keyboards, I would recommend nudging the iOS team specifically, as well as the Android team. This is an area where mobile may well take the lead — adding a new option when you hold down kappa on-screen may be an easier decision than changing a desktop OS keyboard, let alone mandating that physical keyboards should be updated. Note that macOS these days copies this iOS method of holding down base characters to get a list of modified characters, so the traditional idea of “key + modifier key” is not the only way to think about software keyboards.

John, are you able to post references to the issues you opened so that we can track them?

John Hudson

 I imagine Apple regards support in system fonts as a precondition for keyboard support.

Yes. Issues have been opened against both the keyboard and the system fonts.

John, are you able to post references to the issues you opened so that we can track them?

The Apple issues are opened in their internal rdar system. I’ve asked if it is possible for external parties to track the 

In Windows 10, you should be able to find my original issue submission via Feedback Hub if you search for ‘Greek ampersand’. Please upvote. Not sure at what stage it becomes an active issue for Andrew Glass’ team or whether it is trackable then.

Andreas Stötzner

For the avarage Greek keyboard user it is relevant if he spots the glyph on one of the keys (like it is with € or @). Apple is also a hardware producer and is easily in the position to effect this very minor adjustment to its Greek keycaps.

K Pease

Taking steps to put this into my geo-blackletter. Opinions on the approaches?

Andreas Stötzner

you seem to still explore wether to shape the Kappa angular, oblique or bended. You will see. At least the two Kai on the right are proper.

K Pease

Thanks. Is it strange for the capital Kappa to employ that curve when the lower case does not? Do you think it would be better for it to match the Latin(left)?