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Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x) Compatibility

The GreekKeys installer for OS X and the keyboards and fonts work properly under Lion (Mac OS 10.7.x), released July 20, 2011. Nevertheless, BEFORE upgrading to Lion, users of GreekKeys should be aware of the following issues.

1. There is no longer Rosetta support. Therefore, programs written only for PowerPC processors (as opposed to those with “universal binaries” covering both PowerPC and Intel processors) cannot run under Lion. [As of late 2011, a new version of GreekKeys Converter has been released that will run under Lion without Rosetta. Also, FontLab Studio 5 has been updated to run under Lion without Rosetta.]

2. Lion brings reduced functionality to many features of the OS and Apple applications. For example, the Character Viewer under Lion is much less useful than previous versions (apart from confusing interface changes, the choice of the Glyph display for a particular font has been eliminated). In other areas, interface elements have been removed (for instance, line by line vertical scrolling by means of arrows in the vertical scrollbar) or concealed (they appear only if you happen to place your cursor in the right place).

ADDENDUM (Jan. 2012): The functionality of the lost Glyph view of Character Viewer is almost replaced by the Repertoire view of a font that the user can see in Font Book. Select the desired font in the Font Book window's Font column, then use the command Repertoire under the Preview menu. Hover over a character in the display to see the identification of the character, including its Unicode code point, if it has one. But you cannot select and insert a character from this window, as you formerly could from the Glyph view.

3. The interface has been extensively revised to suit trackpads and devices for gestures. If you do not have a trackpad, these changes are of no benefit and may slow down your established work practices.

4. The release version 10.7.0 contains many unresolved bugs and imperfectly implemented changes. As always, it may produce a more pleasant upgrade experience if you wait some weeks or months until 10.7.1 update or even 10.7.2 update has been released.

5. Apple has decided to make the user’s Library folder hidden in 10.7. You can still open your user’s Library folder from the Finder in two ways. (1) Hold down the option key while you open the Finder’s Go menu: Library will appear in the list of menu items (only when the option key has been held down). (2) Select the item Go to Folder… under the Finder’s Go menu (keyboard shortcut command-shift-g), and enter the name ~/Library (tilde, ~ , being a shortcut for the user’s home directory). There is a geeky way to make it permanently unhidden: in Terminal, type the following on the command line: chflags nohidden ~/Library then press return.

Those using Word 2011 with Lion (10.7) should also read the latest information about a potentially serious bug in Word 2011. See details.