|
|
Irish Keyboard Layouts for Mac OS X
Prior to the release of Mac OS 10.2, Irish users of the Macintosh were obliged to choose between using the British keyboard layout shipped with the Mac OS, or to use one of the two keyboard layouts available specifically for Irish, namely, “Gaeilge”, developed by Michael Everson in early 1990, or “Irish Accessories” developed by Mike Brady in late 1989. Both of these keyboard layouts use the Option key to access small acute-accented vowels and Shift-Option to access capital acute-accented vowels. They differed in some other regards, in that “Gaeilge” was based on the Mac OS Celtic character set (used in the Irish and Welsh localizations of OS 6 and 7 and in a number of fonts including those of the CeltScript series) and “Irish Accessories” was based on the standard Mac Roman character set. With the advent of European Monetary Union, however, Ireland could no longer make use of the British locale, because the national currency no longer makes use of £, the pound sign, but now requires €, the euro sign. To support Irish users, therefore, Apple has made available a new locale specific to Ireland in Mac OS X. Because of this, it was possible to get Apple to include an Irish keyboard layout with the Irish locale.
This Mac OS X Irish keyboard layout was released as part of OS X 10.2 on 2002-08-24. The Mac OS X Irish Extended keyboard layout for Unicode support was released as part of OS X 10.3 on 2003-10-24.
The new “Irish” keyboard layout differs from both “Gaeilge” and “Irish Accessories” in a number of ways, although the Option key is still used to access acute-accented vowels. The new “Irish Extended” keyboard layout, similar to Apple's “U.S. Extended” keyboard layout, also offers dead-key access to dotted consonants via Option-w (mnemonic: it is a dot above the “s” key signifying “séimhiú”), and will include access for a large number of other characters used in European languages, as well as letters used in Old and Middle English, transcription of Indic, Semitic, and African languages, and a range of phonetic characters. In the meantime, to support the Mac Roman character set, the “Irish” keyboard layout has been designed as a subset of the “Irish Extended” keyboard layout to facilitate users’ transition from non-Unicode to Unicode-based fonts. The differences between “Gaeilge” and “Irish Accessories” and the new “Irish” keyboard layout have to do with the placement of some dead-keys for other accented vowels and consonants, and of some non-alphabetic symbols. The new keyboard layouts are shown below.
Both “Gaeilge” and “Irish Accessories” used the shamrock symbol to identify the keyboard layout in the Keyboard Menu, because, in 1990, it was thought that the use of the Irish flag might be felt to be inappropriate by some users in Northern Ireland, since the keyboard layout was specific to the Irish language. The new “Irish” keyboard layout uses the Irish flag, however, because the locale itself is specific to the Irish republic. Users in Northern Ireland can choose the pound sign by customizing “Numbers” in “System Preferences: International: Formats”. Users in Ireland and Northern Ireland alike can choose between English and Irish language date formats in the same area. The “Irish” and “Irish Extended” keyboard layout is selected in “System Preferences: International: Input Menu”.
It is unlikely that Apple will choose to add the “Irish” keyboard layout to Mac OS 9, but you can download it here. If you are running OS 7.1 through OS 9.2, drag the keyboard file “Irish” onto your System Folder and you will see a message asking if you want to install the keyboard in your System file. (You do.) Agree, and then you can use the Keyboard control panel to activate the keyboard. NOTE: If you are running Mac OS X, you will have to reboot in Classic mode to install the keyboard layout in your OS 9 System Folder. You won't be able to do this on some machines, in which case you can use ResEdit to install the keyboard layout.
|
Download the new keyboard layout for Mac OS 7 through Mac OS 9. Version 9.2.5. This was updated on 2002-01-30 to correct a minor error in one of the deadkey tables, and again on 2002-10-03 to enable deadkeys when caps lock is active. Some additional oddities were corrected on 2003-01-30 and this should be the final version. The Mac OS X version of this has been updated in in OS X 10.3.
