[B-Greek] RE: Comparing Unicode fonts

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Feb 8 07:04:35 EST 2005


At 12:11 PM +0100 2/8/05, Wieland Willker wrote:
>Stephen wrote:
>> The main net disadvantage of Unicode is an increase
>> in storage requirements,
>
>
>Another more serious problem is that it is more difficult to type
>Unicode Greek. You cannot just change the fonts in Word and type Greek.
>You need a special program, e.g. Keyman, with additional tools, which
>are currently rather obscure, to get roughly the same comfort. Not even
>Microsoft has a user-friendly tool. This is not acceptable. (OTOH the
>target group is rather limited.)
>I know that Unicode has certain advantages, but it must be really
>user-friendly in everyday work. This is currently not the case. ATM it
>is easier to work with non-Unicode fonts.
>Of course one day, when Bibleworks is in Unicode, everybody is using
>Unicode only, and when there are better tools to type it, then I will
>make the change, too, but this is probably at least a year ahead.

Well, admittedly I'm doing it on a Mac, but I'm typing Unicode polytonic
Greek using the same keyboard layout for GreekKeys that I've used for over
ten years and have become accustomed to sufficiently that's it's hardly
more complicated than typing Roman letters; the greatest inconvenience is
having to juggle keyboards when switching from Roman characters to Greek
characters.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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