The New Custom Aleph with Beth Keyboard

I'd like to introduce you to the new custom Aleph with Beth keyboard that not only works on Mac but on other mobile devices.

So let's get into it. Here if you go to keyman .com you're going to want to go to products first and you're going to download the keyman version for the machine that you need.

So in this case macOS. I'm on a Mac here showing this so you go here and download and install it.

Once you install it then you will have on your keyboard options the keyman keyboard and this is an interface that runs in the background and then activates different keyboards that you install within it.

So you can have multiple keyboards within keyman for different functions. Now once you you have that you can access it by clicking it and then going to configuration and then we can download a keyboard down here by clicking it.

All we want to do is search for Aleph. Don't search for Aleph with Beth because it won't find it and then you'll click here and you'll be given the option to install it.

Now another way to do this is to go here on the website to keyboards and just type in Aleph and it will search and find

Aleph with Beth. Click that and you'll see that with a mobile device you can scan this QR code to install it.

You can install it here manually or you can try it out without having to install it.

So if I click here use keyboard online it will load this interface and you can resize this visual keyboard if you want to see a key map and you can resize the text here and then you can start typing and see what it's like.

So unfortunately you can't change the font to be a serif font so you're stuck with this sans serif font to try it out but one of the cool things about this keyboard is that it will automatically change the final letters once you hit the space.

So if I type a cough like this and I hit the space it will change it to a final cough and then

I can add a vowel like a schwa there or I can add a comets etc.

It doesn't look very good here but I will show you in a Google Doc how it looks here in a second.

Now if you're wondering where the key maps are for this new keyboard you just have to go to our resources page over at freehebrew .online

and if you go to type Hebrew with our custom keyboard you'll see here first the

Windows keyboard that we've had for a long time that is a custom keyboard built for PCs and then you'll see down here a link to a

Google Drive file and within that Google Drive you will find these key maps that are very beautifully laid out telling you exactly what each position does on the keyboard.

So the default position, the shift position, and the option position. So you can see for example that under the shift position you can create any letter with a dagesh and also some of these other vowels that you will need and under the option position you'll get some other accents and vowels that you need as well as a way for you to force the final letters rather than the automatic or autocorrect feature that it has.

So if I go over here to a document, let's make this a little larger, so if I go up here change my keyboard to Keyman.

Now if I type in a comma I get an aleph and I can type an a to get a patah,

I can type an L to get a lamed, etc. Now if I type a noon for example and I hit space it's going to make it a final noon automatically.

Looks really nice. I'll give another example of a final letter if I put in a mim and hit space it will automatically change.

So this is a really nice way for you to do that. Once again if you want to force it you can use the option key and hit

M and get them the mim like that the final mim. Now if we go back to the Keyman website

I want to show you that there is a developer link. So if you are in another country please work with us on developing a custom keyboard for you, for Korean or Chinese or Hindi.

There's a lot of keyboards that are not yet intuitive for typing Hebrew. We've tried to make this keyboard intuitive for people in Western countries, in Latin America, in the

United States, etc. with their standard keyboards so that it makes more sense. But that doesn't necessarily mean it will make sense with a

Russian keyboard. So you can learn how to create a custom keyboard right here on this website.

If you do that please send it to us and we will post it on our website so other people can appreciate and enjoy it.

I also want to highlight that there are a lot of other Hebrew keyboards on here. If you search for Hebrew you'll find a lot of other things that people have created.

So if you want to try them out you don't like ours that's fine. Go ahead and check out all of these different options and see what works best for you.

We want to encourage people to learn how to type Hebrew even at a basic level because it does come in handy later on when you're doing articles or papers or if you just want to do a basic search in a lexicon things like that.

I want to give a big thank you to Cameron and Tice who helped us create this keyboard. They did a wonderful job and saved us a lot of time and headache on designing it so that you guys can benefit from it.