cgr-keyboard

cgr-kayboard is a GNU/Linux keyboard for Cypriot Greek, implementing several variations of the diacritics-based system (κατσουνούθκια) which are utilised in academic/literary publications. The keyboard layout is released to the Public Domain — the download package below also contains klfc code, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3, a strong copyleft license.

Download

Most Recent Version:

• cgr-keyboard-1.0.0.tar.xz version 1.0.0 (24.1 kB)
• cgr-keyboard-1.0.0.7z version 1.0.0 (23.2 kB)

see all releases…

Installation

1. Extract the contents of the archive in a temporary location
2. From the command line, navigate to the xkb/ folder
3. Type sudo ./install-system.sh to run the installation script as super-user (if you don’t use sudo, alternatively use su -c './install-system.sh')
4. From your graphical environment’s control panel, go to keyboard settings and add the new keyboard layout to the list of active layouts

Usage

This keyboard layout is based upon xkb’s gr (Extended) layout and it can be used in its place without any problem. It introduces a 3rd (AltGr) and 4th (Shift+AltGR) level to the keyboard, which host the modifiers needed to write Cypriot Greek. It uses the following Unicode combining diacritics which must be typed after the letter to be modified.

• U+0306 COMBINING BREVE ̆σ (κουππούα) - Consonant modifier variant 1 at AltGr-tónos key (US QWERTY ;)
• U+030C COMBINING CARON ̌σ (νι̌σανουιν) - Consonant modifier variant 2 at Shift-AltGR-tónos key (US QWERTY ;)
• U+0345 COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI ͅσ (υπογεγραμμένη)- Consonant modifier variant 3 at AltGr-ióta (US QWERTY i)
• U+032E COMBINING BREVE BELOW ̮ια - Glide indicator at AltGr-apóstrofos key (US QWERTY: ')
• U+0324 COMBINING DIAERESIS BELOW ̤ια - Glide dissolver at Shift-AltGr-apóstrofos key (US QWERTY: ')

Fonts

Most fonts are not prepared to accommodate any or all of those diacritics.

Currently, Mozilla’s font Fira Sans has the best support for all three variants. The Gentium font family supports the caron and breve variants quite well.

More fonts are discussed in this post.

Fira Sans supports all three variants, but subscript-iota for ζ in italics fails

Gentium offers excellent support for the breve and caron variants