[B-Greek] Re: Unicode for typing Greek

John H. Jenkins jenkins at apple.com
Thu Dec 9 14:59:44 EST 2004


On Dec 9, 2004, at 11:43 AM, Doug A Chaplin wrote:



> The new standard for Unicode is OpenType which is also completely cross
> platform Mac OSX and Windows 2000 / XP.
>
Well, not *quite* completely. One of the wrinkles in Unicode is that 
accented letters can frequently be represented in more than one way. 
Thus, alpha-acute can be either a character in its own right or a 
combination of two characters, alpha and acute. OpenType has support 
for having alpha + acute show up correctly through the use of 
attachment points. That is, the alpha glyph can say "put accents on top 
of me *here*," which allows for pretty precise placement of the 
beasties. This provision within OpenType is not currently supported on 
Mac OS X, so a font like Gentium which has not been designed 
specifically for use on Mac OS X will not necessarily position accents 
correctly.

The solution, which is adequate for biblical Greek, is to use the 
precomposed form, alpha-acute as one character. The system font, Lucida 
Grande, was extended in Mac OS X 10.3 to cover all of polytonic Greek, 
and any Windows font with Unicode polytonic Greek support will work on 
Mac OS X even prior to 10.3 (with the one proviso). The main problem 
here is finding a Unicode-savvy application, but as of now, the most 
recent versions of most major applications support Unicode (Word, Adobe 
applications, FileMaker Pro). Apple's own software (Mail, Safari, 
TextEdit, iTunes) supports Unicode, and anything written using the 
Cocoa programming framework supports Unicode.



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