Palamedes

Description

Palamedes is a utility useful to native Greek speakers and Greek scholars (Hellenists) who wish to type traditional Greek (often referred to as multi-accented or polytonic) under the Microsoft Windows Operating system. All versions of Windows (post Windows XP, 32 bit and 64 bit) are supported.

This utility allows the typing of multi-accented (polytonic) Greek text in the manner of writing by hand. Accents and breathings are typed after the vowels, in any order, without dead keys. In other words, first we type the letter and then we "decorate" it with the required accents. Typing multi-accented Greek with Palamedes is more intuitive and it is similar to the way we write by hand. Furthermore, it is easier to memorize the very few accent keys of Palamedes when compared with the 25+ key combinations needed by the official Microsoft Greek Polytonic keymap.

Palamedes also facilitates the typing of punctuation and other symbols used in the Greek script (e.g. ϗ,Ϟ,Ϡ,ϙ,€,·).

Table of the main accent keys

For example to produce the charcter ᾄ, we type 'a' followed by any combination of the keys '/', ']' and '|'.

The function of the dead key (;:), as used in monotonic Greek, has been retained. So the character ά can be entered with the keys ';a' or 'a/'.

For detailed usage information and a more complete table of the function of the keys see the documentation included in the package.

Palamedes is written in C and it uses the Windows API hook mechanism to trap and modify key press events when Greek is typed. Typing in other languages is not affected and Palamedes ignores keys that does not know about.

Compiling

To compile Palamedes you need GNU Make and the MinGW GCC compiler.

Tex Live is also needed to build the documentation and the cheat sheet.

git clone https://github.com/proteusx/palamedes
cd palamedes/src
make

This will build the executable palamedes.exe, its hooking library hooker.dll, and the documentation.

Palamedes can also be built with Microsoft Visual Studio albeit with some modifications to the source files. These modifications are found commented out in the source files.

Precompiled binaries

There are compressed precompiled binaries and documentation available for 32 and 64 bit windows. Download the latest version and extract in some convinient location keeping the 4 files together.

Running Palamedes

Palamedes has been tested with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10, is extremely fast and unintrusive and fully portable (i.e. it installs nothing in the system directories nor it affects the registry in any way). To use it, place the executable and its dll in the same directory (preferably in \Program Files\palamedes\ and create a Desktop shortcut for palamedes.exe) and double click on palamedes.exe. If all is in order an icon will appear in the Notification Area (Systray). Activate Palamedes from its systray icon, switch your keyboard to Greek, and you can start typing polytonic Greek.

Right click and Help on the Palamedes' icon, pops up a list of the keys and their effect.

Note that you need at least one Unicode font that includes the glyphs (characters) in the Greek (0370-03FF) and the Extended Greek (1F00-1FFF) ranges. Examples of such fonts are Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, Consolas and the DejaVu family.

For a complete usage information refer to the documentation.

To Do

The documentation is in Greek only. Translate documentation into English.