Experiments with polytonic greek
Joe Schaffner
I've been experimenting with polygreek too, but I hesitate to add to
your already established thread...
I took the Times New Roman ttf of a Windows XP system and installed it
on my SuSE 9.2 at home. To my surprise, I see this font supports
polygreek, so I tried setting a couple entries from a popular
dictionary of modern Greek:
http://modern-greek-verbs.tripod.com/home.html#unicode
With this font, I can capture the entire entry, no problems, pointing
fingers, arrows, boxes, tiny-elvises, polygreek etymology... There is
virtually nothing I cannot do with the Unicode character set alone.
I'm using the character map program to capture the data. I know the
Times font is working, because if I select another font, like the SuSE
free fonts, or even the Microsoft Arial, which I also ripped off, the
polygreek characters are not rendered.
I was wondering, since the font worked so unexpectedly well, maybe the
monogreek keymap would too.
But how would I know?
I gather from your correspondence that no polygreek keymap is
currently available, but I'm hoping the monogreek map might already do
something reasonable with poly greek.
True, the monogreek tonos is not the same as the polygreek accents,
but it should be possible to combine the two alphabets in a single
keymap, just like their part of the same font.
This would spare me tha agony of changing keymaps using the
what-ever-you-call-it, the xkb "accelerator" key. (Going from Greek to
English is already a pain in the ass.)
Would it be possible to extend the monogreek keymap to do polygreek?
You'd have one less module to distribute, and one less thing to install.
Getting back to the font:
The Linux Mozilla displays this document properly on my system at
home, but when I go to a MS system at the University, and use Internet
Explorer, the polygreek and some, but not all, of the special
characters are rendered by little boxes.
The Firefox on the XP system is a little better, all the glyphs
display, but not very nicely, at least not as nice as the Linux
Mozilla, which is perfect. There seems to be some kind of glyph
substitution going on.
I assume the font contains a table which maps the integer-valued
unicode character (which comes from the utf-8 byte stream) to a glyph
index inside the font. This table must be created somehow when the
font is designed, so I can't get at it, but I was wondering why the
same font, Microsoft Times New Roman, would behave differently in
different application programs, even if they are running on different
platforms.
Any guesses?
Thanks.
Joe
PS
I was very happy with the Font installation program which is part of
the KDE desktop. You just open the font directory with Konqueror and
click the "Install" button. Congratulations to whoever did it.
(Only I could not figure out how to install the fonts on Gnome. It's
probably just a matter of copying the font files to the right
directory, but which one?)
I assume X windows has its own font api, so Microsoft ttfs should not
work right out of the box on an X system. Maybe that's the job of the
"font server", to convert one interface to another. I have no idea
where it is running, as a separate process, as a module linked to the
X server, nor do I care... But, my compliments to that guy too, who
ever he was.
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