[B-Greek] Re: Unicode vs. Older Software - A Survey
Curtis Hinson
curtis at curtishinson.com
Tue Apr 19 15:34:08 EDT 2005
You know, the unaccented word appears just fine in my IE6 on XP, while the
polytonic word includes boxes. I imagine that monotonic script would work
fine for most of the Greek we do here. After all, the majority of the
transliteration we currently do on here doesn't include any representation
of diacriticals.
There is a UTF-8 monotonic version of the NA-26 and the LXX on my website:
http://curtishinson.com/
In checking the search strings that lead people to my various Greek texts
each month (up to 37,000 unique hits per month), I rarely ever see a
polytonic string. The vast majority of people who hit my site are using
monotonic Greek to search the web.
I am not a fan of Greek diacriticals. They are not found in manuscripts,
which makes them editorial decisions in any case. I think Greek got along
just fine before them and continues to in the modern language today. And
they sure needlessly complicate using Unicode Greek.
I teach my students Greek using monotonic script and a modern accent, and I
think that was very good for them as their basic picture of the language.
Later I taught them what the diacritics mean when reading a critical text.
They also are aware there is such a thing as an Erasmian "pronunciation" but
I sure wouldn't teach that to them. (I am involved in house churches where
I teach others to use Greek in study, devotion, and prayer if they are so
inclined.)
Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
Abilene Christian University
-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of James Tauber
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 4:35 PM
To: Wieland Willker; B-Greek
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Re: Unicode vs. Older Software - A Survey
> Can you see the accented letters here:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2005-April/033913.html
> or do you see two boxes?
> What font do you use for plain text?
On encountering a character missing from the current font, some applications
will use an alternative font that *does* contain a glyph for the character.
In Safari on Mac OS X the link above works fine.
In Firefox on Windows XP it also works fine.
In IE 6.0 on Windows XP, however, the accented characters appear as boxes,
whether I set my plain text font to Andale Mono, Courier New or Lucida
Console.
The reason Firefox works, regardless of my plain text font choice is that
when it encounters O( and can't find it in the current font, it will
(successfully, in my case) attempt to use an alternative font for that
character.
One might argue whether Safari/OSX and Firefox/WinXP are, *in general*,
acting as one would like but certainly in the context of this discussion,
their behaviour is preferable over IE's.
James Tauber
--
James Tauber http://jtauber.com/
journeyman of some http://jtauber.com/blog/
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