Trailblazin Ministries Blog

Tech Stuff

Interesting Solution to a Problem

Written by LaRosa Johnson
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Filed under: Ministry, Tech Stuff

One of my biggest (and really only) gripes with WORDsearch is that there is no way for me to natively type in Greek or Hebrew when I am using their word processor or taking notes. Within the past year or so I have gotten heavy into using the original languages in my studies, and I have wanted to use them in my notes as well. In WORDsearch the only way in which I was able to put Greek or Hebrew into my notes or studies was to copy and paste from another window within the program (i.e. from the Strong's Dictionary). This was very frustrating for me, and I couldn't seemingly figure out a solution to the problem. Throw in the fact Logos has a built-in utility to do this kind of thing, and you could see where this was going.

Well, tonight I had my first Greek class at church, and it went rather well. It's very exciting and I'm looking forward to the challenge ahead of me. But, in class tonight, the teacher, my friend, Cliff Beveridge, was asking how we felt about using the church's e-learning website to submit our homework. I had no problem with that, until I thought about how in the world would I type in Greek without copying & pasting? Then on the drive home from church, it dawned on me that Logos had made available unicode keyboard mappings for the ancient languages that were easy to install.

So, I get home from church and search their website to find them (Windows Keyboards for Ancient Languages). I downloaded the ones for Greek and Hebrew and installed them. I then created hotkeys that would allow me to switch easily from one language to the other (i.e. I can type Left ALT+Shift+2 and my keyboard mapping will switch to Greek, with Left ALT+Shift+1 switching back to US English). I opened up Microsoft Word to give it a try and it worked beautifully. From there, I thought for a minute wondering if this would work in WORDsearch 8 as well. I opened up WS8, clicked to open a new word processor window, changed my keyboard mapping to Greek and started typing away with the Greek characters showing up. I even tried Hebrew (Left ALT+Shift+3 for me) and it automatically switched the formatting from left to right over to right to left. Awesome!

Who would have thought that my company's number one competitor would provide a simple download that would allow me to make my use of WS8 all the more proficient and easier?! I'm glad they did, I'm glad it worked, and as a result my studies will be much more fruitful and efficient. The only thing that I need to do now is work on learning all of the Hebrew keys, as I'm already pretty familiar with the Greek. It's awesome how stuff like that works out. A great way to end a productive weekend and a really long day.