Shibboleth: A Free Tool for Typing in Ancient Scripts

A few years ago Bob came up with the idea to create a small utility to facilitate typing in ancient scripts, and the first version of Shibboleth was born.

We have been using this tool internally for a couple of years, but have recently updated it to take advantage of some of the new technologies made available with Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0.

We’ve found Shibboleth to be such a handy tool that we wanted to share it with you. Best of all, we’ve decided to make it free for personal use!
Here are three reasons you might want to use Shibboleth.

1. Shibboleth makes typing in a script you don’t know well very easy. It’s perfect for those who are still learning to type in Greek and Hebrew; it’s also great for those who can skillfully type in the biblical languages, but occasionally need to type in a non-biblical ancient script like Ugaritic or Coptic.
2. Shibboleth makes typing obscure characters easy. Even if you’re proficient at typing in Greek and Hebrew, you probably don’t have characters like the Greek digamma (ϝ) or the Hebrew inverted nun (׆) memorized. With Shibboleth that’s no longer a problem. No more hunting for all those keyboard layouts in PDF files somewhere. Shibboleth provides a single location to look up all those obscure ancient script characters!
3. Shibboleth is also an ideal tool for learning to type proficiently in an ancient script. By practicing for a while in Shibboleth, Greek and Hebrew students will become skilled at typing in no time. The transition from using Shibboleth to typing directly in Greek or Hebrew in other Windows applications like Word is easy since Shibboleth uses the same keyboard layouts as our free Windows keyboards. So once you have a feel for where all the characters are in Shibboleth, making the switch is seamless.

Shibboleth works with both Vista and XP. However, if you’re running XP, you’ll need to download the free .NET Framework 3.0 from Microsoft if you don’t already have it. (We provide the link for you on the Shibboleth page.)
A note about browsers: Shibboleth is a ClickOnce application. You will probably want to use Internet Explorer 7 to install it. To install Shibboleth from Firefox, you will need to use the FFClickOnce add-on or the IE Tab add-on.
Visit https://www.logos.com/shibboleth to find out more and install the application. Enjoy!