Thursday, 27 January 2011
Old English uses a number of letters and punctuation marks, like the thorn þ and the eth ð, that do not exist in modern English. Typing these can be a challenge. This MS Word document has information on how to get your Windows computer to produce these characters, OELetters.doc (721 Kb). (I don’t know the Mac, but if someone sends me info on how to do this on the Mac, I’ll add it to the document.)
If you’re typing for the web, like on this site’s discussion forum, it’s probably best to limit yourself to the most commonly supported characters. The more esoteric characters will probably not be seen on other people’s systems.
If you’re a hardcore user of Old English, you’ll probably want to download the Junicode font and even this keyboard map.
[Updated the linked MS Word document, Jan 2011 — dw]
