Automatic Diacritics
Peter Kirby
kirby at earthlink.net
Fri Oct 4 08:24:14 EDT 2002
You may disregard my earlier request for a list of Greek words. I have
since satisfied my needs by writing a program to extract a list of Greek
words from a file in Beta Code format. I was successful in applying this
program to the NA-26 file, and I may go on to generate word lists for
Josephus, Homer, or other authors where a Beta Code text with accents is
available.
The purpose of this list of Greek words is to allow me to create an
application that would aid the work of typing Greek. Since the Beta Code
accents and other marks are difficult to reach on the keyboard for a touch
typist, as much as half the time spent transcribing Greek can be taken up in
typing these special character codes. To alleviate this problem, I decided
to create something that would automatically insert the diacritics when a
person types the unaccented Greek words.
Because it is my favorite text editor, I chose to write the application to
work in Notetab Pro. If you'd like to work with my application as it exists
now, you will need to download Notetab Pro. Here is the link:
http://www.notetab.com/download.htm
Then you need to download the "clip bar," which is essentially a macro file.
This has the data that correlates the unaccented Greek words with the
accented ones. Place it into the "Libraries" folder of your Notetab Pro
program.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/autobeta.zip
Then select the "BetaCode" clipbar while typing your document.
Currently the file is limited to words that appear in the NA-26 Greek New
Testament. It could be expanded to include other bodies of literature.
Currently, when more than one word with diacritics corresponds to the input
word, the most frequently occurring word is chosen for output. I tried out
a system in which all the corresponding words were printed out, but deleting
the incorrect ones quickly becomes tedious and defeats the purpose.
If you want to put your Greek files on the web, you might want to run your
Beta Code files through this converter to get Unicode:
http://www.jiffycomp.com/smr/unicode/
Your comments are welcome.
best,
Peter Kirby
Early Christian Writings - 30 to 200
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/
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