Help with diacritics for transcribing Ottoman Turkish and othet Turkic languages (eg. e with dot above and macron)

[Yorgos Dedes]

I would be grateful if someone could advise or offer Ukelele tips about how to combine 'e with dot above' with a macron, or dotted i with a macron etc?  E with dot above does exist as a unicode character, but I can not find a way, not even with Ukelele of adding a macron on to it.   

I attach the existing Ottoman Transl(iteration) keyboard layout in case that helps.

Might there be some Ukelele expert in London I wonder?

[Geke]

Hi Yorgos,

Maybe you can leave the combining to the application? Just typing "e with dot above", then "macron" could do the trick (U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE, not the spacing one ¯ you have in the layout on the , key now). ė + U+0305: ė̅

Another approach is to assign a sequence of two Unicode characters to one key, which can be done with Ukelele.

I encourage you to read Ukelele's tutorial :) also because, apart from the above, you may want to create dead keys for the diacritics, to make your keyboard layout less crowded and easier to remember.
As an inspiration, you can activate the layout "U.S. Extended" and see how it works. (However, with that layout one can't type "e with dot and overline", as far as I can see.)

London is a village, but so is the world...

[Pim Rietbroek]

Hi Yorgos,

On 1 Apr 2015, at 13:21, Yorgos Dedes <g...@soas.ac.uk> wrote:

I would be grateful if someone could advise or offer Ukelele tips about how to combine 'e with dot above' with a macron, or dotted i with a macron etc?  E with dot above does exist as a unicode character, but I can not find a way, not even with Ukelele of adding a macron on to it.   

<snip>

You can. As the Ukelele Help file says: “If you have the output you want visible on your computer, perhaps in the Character Palette, you can drag the output onto a key in the Ukelele window. When you do this, the output gets changed to what you dragged. Output can be longer than a single character, up to twenty characters in fact. So, you can take a selection from a word processor or similar and drag it onto a key to use that as the key output.”

The trick is to use one of the many combining diacritics Unicode provides us with.  What you could do is first drag the ‘e with dot above’ to a key of your choosing and add the ‘combining macron’, U+0304  to that same key.  That key will then output e with dot and macron above.

Do the same with dotted i, etc.

Please remember that the font(s) you use must contain the combining diacritics (many now do) and that they need to have the right internal tables to handle positioning of the diacritics correctly. I always point people to the Brill typeface.  :-)

HTH,

Pim

[Geke]

Nice, Pim, I didn't know that way to enter key output in Ukelele.
It's true, Ukelele's Help file may be more useful to Yorgos than the Tutorial or Manual.

And just to confirm: you're also right that he should use U+0304, not the U+0305 I mentioned.