Unicode is the international standard for encoding and representing text in all languages electronically, and so is the most reliable way to enter Greek and Hebrew text in your documents. In addition, the Unicode standard supports mixing both left-to-right and right-to-left languages, which is key for students working with Hebrew.

Older methods of representing Greek and Hebrew text relied on using special fonts that replaced the standard 90+ Latin characters on the English keyboard with Greek or Hebrew equivalents. However, that replacement was only skin deep, and as far as the computer was concerned the the text was still Latin characters underneath—which became abundantly clear if you opened the document on a different computer that didn't have the same font installed.

Your carefully transcribed Greek text: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος

…would become: VEn avrch|/ h=n o` lo,goj

Unicode avoids such compatibility problems since you are entering the actual Greek and Hebrew characters into your document (rather than Latin characters masquerading as Greek or Hebrew), and all current computers can display that text as they have default fonts that include the most commonly used Greek and Hebrew characters.

Unicode is also great for publishing Greek and Hebrew text on the web. The first example line of Greek text above is Unicode, rendered using the fonts already installed on your device.

Ready to start typing in Greek or Hebrew? You'll need to enable an appropriate keyboard layout that maps Greek or Hebrew characters to your keyboard:

• Enable alternate Keyboard Layouts

Your computer's default fonts may work, but they will generally be optimized for modern Greek and Hebrew. If you want your Greek or Hebrew to have the more ancient style that you're used to seeing in most Biblical Studies literature, you can install and use different fonts:

• Get Greek & Hebrew Fonts for Biblical Studies