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KelechiIsioduforIgboFontsandTypography
Download the package best suited for your operating system. This guide was produced for an installation on 10.4 and later OSX is now at version 7 Lion. Opt to download the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, version of Kasahorows pack.
When installation is complete. Log out and log back in to bed-in the installation.
Now that you are back in from logging out you need to go to the control panel for Macintoshes <System Preferences> and reach the International menu in the <Personal> heading first row among the sections and settings: This is how that place under <System Preferences> looks like on the 10.4 Tiger system
You can see where we are headed: the icon third from right, top row sandwiched between the Dock and Security icons. Under the International settings, you choose the language of your Mac, figure out your regional settings and such; you also see the tabs, <Languages>, <Formats>, <Input Menu>. To configure the Kasahorow installation, you need to access the Input Menu. This particular installation adds three new languages to your options. A cursory check reveals that your Mac now boasts the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages as fresh additions. All these languages share a similar icon and are not differentiated
according to national flags as you see some of the other languages have. They now form a part of the options you have for your Mac. You need to check the box for the particular language you do want to use. Checking the box adds that language to your input menu and makes it available for use within the wider applications of your Mac. Later in this guide we show you an optional further step you can take to add a colourful logo or flag beside your language choice to personalize your option. We call this Modding the flag or the icon Let us check out a few graphics or screen dumps:
4a locating Igbo ^^
4 characters bearing diacritical marks (these are dots or accents with which they are designated in the standard orthography [Onwu]). Yoruba also has diacritics but we will perform the test for an Igbo case: installation and activation. Time for the Union test: First of all, with Igbo showing, opt to <show the keyboard viewer> this presents a virtual front face of your installed and active keyboard layouts (See examples at the end of this document).
Now, follow the sense of the visible layouts to produce the sequence <> or in CAPS <I O >. Use the shift and Cap buttons while observing the keyboard layout to see how the arrangement of your keys is modified. Play around a bit and see how keys map to typing on your own system. Typing and getting these characters essentially concludes this method for the keyboard. The currency symbol was inserted via the character palette and appears to be the only character, glyph or letter of interest that the developers did not think to add generically to their keyboard layout. It is possible to include this together with any keyboard layout fashioning tool that works for Apple Macintoshes like Ukelele for instancebut this is a more advanced topic and delves beyond the scope for this guide. It is important to also test that you can get your diacritics on browsers. I have Mozillas Firefox and Apples Safari installed. I am currently working on an old Tiger Mac <10.4.11>; but the method has been successfully tested for more
modern machines. The latest machine or specification on which this method was tested; is Snow Leopard <10.6.3> The browser:
In Apple Safari, top right hand corner the characters produced. The graphic also shows a Moded icon for my Igbo Keyboard; savvy customers will recognise Biafran colours. To mode your keyboards flag icons is a special skill, yet many advanced users can manage it. The particular ways of doing this do not form part of this guide.
One Caveat: [Authors Notes] It seems versions of Word Mac might quarrel with recognising your characters; for instance, on my Word Mac 2004, I could use the method successfully but on my Word Mac 2008, my system would not use this Igbo keyboard and pressing the corresponding keys produced no results. Yet there are work-arounds: using a common text editor like TextEdit or X-PAD, working on such systems and transferring [cutting+pasting] the text later to Word Mac, where it can be marked up and styled and formatted. Still, we reckon, that having the fluency and ease of production, which this tool affords, the amount of native Mac applications which can recognise it and which afford it easy compatibility, together with obviating the need to use the Character Palette, each time for your Igbo text production is well worth the time taken to both install the product and using the guide to activate it. The graphic below shows the state of your Igbo Keyboard, shown via the inbuilt keyboard viewer.
In Ukelele:
The command+shift+3 keys highlighted in both layout graphics demonstrate how to capture screen dumps on a MAC.
Happy Igbo Fonts Producing This guide has been prepared by Kelechi Isiodu For Igbo Fonts and Typography. Part of Thought Experiments. If you spot errors or merely want to discuss the method or
Fonts and Encodings for the Igbo Language or the ways and Means of modding your flag icon. Write to Kelechi.isiodu@igboft.com Or if you prefer Facebook; Kelechi.isiodu@facebook.com Igbo Fonts and Typography is also an Igbo Language Studies and Advocacy group. Write to us @t iFonT@groups.facebook.com Thank you. We hope you find the guide useful.