No, that’s not a problem. Let me try differently.
This is an accent: ά
This is a breathing: ἀ
Combining those is not an issue: ἄ (There are pre-composed Unicode characters for that. Any keyboard for Classical Greek has to be able to produce this.)
This is a macron: ᾱ (This does not belong to the group of accents nor to breathings, it marks vowel length in texts for students, dictionaries, grammars etc.) Also no trouble here. Most keyboards can produce this.
The problems start when there are words (and there are lots of them) that have an accent (and possibly also a breathing) and a macron on the same vowel, like this: ᾱ́
For the last case, there are no pre-composed Unicode characters. So I need a keyboard which is able to use multiple deadkeys for combining diacritics (including macrons) to produce such characters. Only very few keyboards seem to have a provision for that. Greek Polytonic Unicode by David Perry (Greek Polytonic Unicode Keyboard Help) seems to be one of the few. But it is very hard to use for people with a Non-American keyboard.
So that’s the problem. It’s not about characters not displaying correctly. I can see them just fine. It’s about producing them.
Now the question: Given the situation above, is anyone aware of a user-friendly method of typing those characters with combining diacritics on a QWERTZ keyboard. Can keyboards like Galaxie Greek (Mnemonic) be modified to allow input of combining diacritics or is there another handy approach?
Thanks a lot.