Kasahorow on Macs: Igbo [Maka mma nile asụsụ na okwu Igbo maara] Kelechi Isiodu for Igbo Fonts and Typography 

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  F o r   s ome   t i m e   n ow ,   I t   h a s   b e e n   p o s s i b l e   t o   u s e   t h e   c h a r a c t e r  o r   s ymbo l s   i n p u t   p a l e t t e   o n   b o t h   k i n d s   o f  c ompu t e r  Ma c s   a n d   P C s   t o   i n p u t   t h e  d i a c r i t i c ‐ b e a r i n g   c h a r a c t e r s   o f   t h e   I g b o  l a n g u a g e ,   t h i s   g u i d e   s h ow s   f o r   t h e  Ma c i n t o s h   c a s e ,   a  wa y   o f   d o i n g   t h i s  w i t h o u t   g o i n g   t h r o u g h   o r   u s i n g   t h e  c h a r a c t e r   p a l e t t e .    This guide incorporates screen dumps to show how to install, activate and use kasahorow’s product or keyboard layout to type the under-dotted characters of the standard Igbo language and alphabet-on a Macintosh without going through the character palette. To modify the layout, a separate product called the Ukelele may be used. Use of the Ukelele is covered by the guides given by that producers of that and only cursory reference is made to that software system. Tour Guidance: Every time angle brackets are encountered as part of this guide, like so <>, they enclose a bit of text which you are very likely to see as part of your system. So, if you see <System Preferences>, it means that ‘System Preferences’ occurs as part of your operating system setup; depending on the particular operating system you are working with. Italicised words or text like so: introduce special terms both to the operating system [Mac OSX] and to the science of writing and fontography. Such terms might bear using a dictionary, to look them up. Googling obliges one happily. At the time this guide and reference was made (March 2013), both products could be accessed via the various websites of the involved companies and were free of charge and Ukelele was an open source project.

1 Download the product

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 Kasahorow’s pack.

2 Unpack and install the package

When installation is complete. Log out and log back in to ‘bed-in’ the installation.

3 Logging out and logging back in

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 ^^

4b Activating the keyboard layout ^^ So, beside the clock at the very top of your screen—click on the presently selected icon or flag. You can see in the graphic above that I have presently on my system a selection of three languages, British, Vietnamese and Igbo. A check mark is presently set against <British> on my system. Hopefully you should have something corresponding to a similar situation with your option of languages available through the same place on your screen. Go ahead and click on <Igbo> to set the check mark ✓ or ‘good tick /mark’ against Igbo on your system. [It generally is good practice to save, logout and restart the system at this point it—it is part of bedding in the process as before.] Once you are back, it will be time to test your Igbo keyboard layout installation. Set the check mark ✓ against the <Igbo> among your language options. Igbo has

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 <ụñṅọị₦> or in CAPS … ̣<ṶṄI ̣̭ O̭₦>. 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 instance—but 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 Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s 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 keyboard’s 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: [Author’s 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.