New Shibboleth Update

Back in 2007 we unleashed Shibboleth, a tool we designed to help people key in ancient scripts more accurately, even if they weren’t proficient in those scripts.

We’ve updated Shibboleth with a number of improvements:

• Shibboleth now supports a Rich Text copy option which omits the XML language tags we use internally, but includes the user’s font choice. This makes Shibboleth much nicer for pasting text directly into Logos Bible Software (for notes or searching), or into any other Unicode application, such as Microsoft Word (latest version 2010 will work better for some scripts/characters than older versions).
• Shibboleth now remembers the user’s settings from language to language and between sessions. Once you’ve selected the fonts and character palette layouts that work best for you or your current project, they will be preserved until you change them.
• New scripts supported: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Akkadian, Hittite and Old Persian cuneiform. Some of the important cuneiform sign lists have been incorporated into character palettes to provide alternate methods for locating characters.
• New character palettes added for many languages – particularly more lists that group characters by shape to make it easier to select between glyphs that can be easily confused. (See below.)
• New characters added to existing scripts to keep Shibboleth up to date with advances in the Unicode Standard.

An example of a character list that is alphabetic – easy if you know the script forwards and backwards.

An example of a new palette that sorts characters by shape – better if you are trying to enter text in a script you don’t know, because the similar shapes can be compared easily.

Shibboleth is free for personal, non-commercial use. For more information and to download your copy, click here.

What do you think of the update?