Mac OS 10.6 and Russian keyboard layouts

[Steven Clancy]

Dear Ben and SEELANGS,

I upgraded my home desktop Mac last summer and am currently setting up a new laptop, so I've dealt with the same issues in Snow Leopard.

For some reason, keyboards that have worked for more than a decade (I've been using a phonetic keyboard that toggles between Latin/Cyrillic when caps lock is on/off in one form or another since about 1995) don't work in all software packages anymore (you get the greying out when they aren't available). It's a bit of a pain, but one can switch over to a new keyboard layout and get used to it or take steps to make things work the old way. There are multiple built-in options these days, although one tends to like what one has been using for a while.

The one I've long used for Cyrillic is Matvey Palchuk's Russian-AppleStd with the toggle feature between Latin/Cyrillic, very useful, especially when you're often making things for pedagogical purposes with lots of mixed language in it. This keyboard has been updated (http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/rusmac/), so it works with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, but it no longer has the toggle feature. However, it's not such a big loss as you can now easily switch between the two last used keyboards with the keystroke command+space bar. This is just as easy, sometimes even easier than the old caps lock system, since  you can then actually use caps lock for all caps as well.

But if you have old keyboards that you want to update, there is a free program called Ukelele, that lets you modify or create keyboard layouts for Macs. This is another option to make something or adapt something to work in Snow Leopard. I had this problem with my Czech and Polish layouts, also about 15 years old, and I've been able to get by with these solutions, keeping things the same as I was used to and prefer.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele

in some ways, it's amazing that the same keyboards worked for so long, even before the unicode age, yet still worked fine in a unicode compatible way and alongside multiple OS upgrades through the years.

Good luck, hope this helps,

Steven


Steven Clancy
Senior Lecturer in Russian and Slavic Linguistics
Academic Director, Center for the Study of Languages
Director, Slavic Language Program

University of Chicago
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

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