Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 10:37:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Daedalus Guy <daedalus_guy_at_mac.com>
>Here's one example. Last night I downloaded the Athenian font to
>try it out (on MacOS X). As an end-user typing Greek words, it
>sucks. It literally has every possible different accent/letter
>combination on a different key. Now, I'm not sure whether this is
>the fault of unicode or Greek Keys (or both--I just assumed Greek
>Keys was an input method for the Athenian unicode font, but maybe
>I'm wrong there), but it almost makes the font unusable for any
>practical purpose (other than text importing).
AFAIK, Athenian doesn't use Unicode encoding but GreekKeys encoding
(GreekKeys is an input method but also the name of the specific
encoding they used for their font). There was a Unicode Athenian font
at some point, but it is no longer available.
And you probably want to try AthenMacGr by Julien Salort (works on OS X)
http://membres.lycos.fr/geographer/AthenMacgrX.html
It's a postcardware.
>I really don't mean to rant, and I can understand the utility of
>having all possible character glyphs in one huge resource (ie, the
>unicode tables)--but it seems to me that the advantage of unicode is
>mostly from a system/standardization perspective, and it seems to be
>a disadvantage from an end-user perspective (ie, someone typing a
>paper in multiple languages).
Not really.
The only advantage of using your own little encoding is that you
already have the MacRoman keyboard layout for input. I offerred to
replace that by a Unicode working one, so this advantage is null.
And there are tons of disadvantages regarding text exchange,
standardization (unless you use some 8 bit classical Greek encoding),
etc.
>It seems to me that we're looking at the font issue from two
>opposite sides. You prefer a standardized unicode font to allow
>importing of vast amounts of Greek documents from various sources
>and translation. I'm looking for a Greek font that people can
>actually type with on word processors.
Not a problem. I think I can design a keyboard layout that will be
used by the Newton for typing with the Newton keyboard, just like the
French layouts I've made. I am not 100% sure, though. And there are
plenty of software solutions, including the ones Sam suggested.
> >>This is the main problem. I haven't figured out how to make accents
>and breathing (?) (not sure of the English word for the little sign
>above first rho/vowel of words). <<
>
>Yeah, we call them "breathings" or "breathing marks". "Rough
>breathings" make the "h" sound (such as over the rho). "Smooth
>breathings" don't make any sound.
Apparently, my dictionary hasn't betrayed me (I wasn't sure because
it didn't mention smooth breathings). This is much less poetic that
the French word which is "esprit" (spirit), so when I was doing Greek
studies, just before the war with the eskimos, I imagined that words
had a kind of soul.
Paul
-- Home page: http://www.kallisys.com/ Newton-powered WebServer: http://newton.kallisys.net:8080/-- Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.guns-media.com/mirrors/newton/faq/ This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Jul 03 2002 - 14:02:03 EDT