[B-Greek] Re: Comparing Unicode fonts

William Zeitler william at faithfulbible.com
Wed Feb 9 17:27:02 EST 2005


>I personally see only one real advantage of Unicode. The real advantage
of Unicode is that every combination of accent and letter is
individually designed. This makes the appearance of the script more
perfect.
The possibility of exchanging documents with others who don't have the
same font is a pseudo-problem. Everybody working in the field has the
(about ten) fonts, needed to display the Greek correctly. Of course
there appears an accident here and there, but this ignorance of a few
should not force us all to use some complicated new technology.
And even in the cases where an Unicode font would allow to display the
Greek correctly, different line wraps and spaces make the appearance
different. You still need the same fonts if you want to view a document
in the way the author intended it.

Unicode is the wave of the future. The only question is how quickly, not IF.
The reason it was developed was not for us polytonic Greek folks, etc. It
was developed because of the practical problem of the vast variety of users
on the WORLD WIDE web that need to display their alphabets/glyphs in their
native languages as well as others.

If you think about the infinite permutations of a native Chinese user (with
their 1000s of characters) who also would like to read Sanskrit, meanwhile
across the border a native Mongolian user would like to read Hebrew, and
include all of the above in an email, it's easy to see that this is not a
mere 'pseudo-problem' requiring 'about ten fonts'. Unicode solves this
general problem. It is not a 'complicated new technology' -- it is actually
elegantly simple.

The problems arise because of the technology change that needs to take
place. All of us using the old/current '8bit' and 'MBCS' solutions today
have the issue of migrating our software and data/text to this new
technology. In the short term there will be pain. In the long run we will
gain an elegant solution to the problem of representing ALL human character
sets -- past (polytonic Greek/Estrangelo/LinearB) and present (asian/latin).
That's why it's called UNI-code.

Switching from moveable type to computers was painful too.

william zeitler

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of Wieland Willker
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:47 AM
To: B-Greek
Subject: [B-Greek] Re: Comparing Unicode fonts


Mark Goodacre wrote:
> I have not found that to be the case -- one can simply
> switch to a Greek keyboard within Windows XP / 2000
> without trouble.


It is possible to switch keyboards. That is not the problem. But I doubt
that you can type fluently using this keyboard. Can you?

Currently the combination of Keyman with the Classical Greek keyboard by
M. Lopez is the best solution, IMHO. But I feel uncomfortable to be
dependent on some obscure download (from an AOL page), which has no real
documentation and where I don't know how long it will be available.
I think it is a good tool, but the time for Unicode has not yet come.
Nobody knows how to type Unicode Greek in e.g. Bibleworks or MS-Word in
about one year. Currently no "official" tools are available.

I personally see only one real advantage of Unicode. The real advantage
of Unicode is that every combination of accent and letter is
individually designed. This makes the appearance of the script more
perfect.
The possibility of exchanging documents with others who don't have the
same font is a pseudo-problem. Everybody working in the field has the
(about ten) fonts, needed to display the Greek correctly. Of course
there appears an accident here and there, but this ignorance of a few
should not force us all to use some complicated new technology.
And even in the cases where an Unicode font would allow to display the
Greek correctly, different line wraps and spaces make the appearance
different. You still need the same fonts if you want to view a document
in the way the author intended it.


Regarding the Uncial font Joseph Weaks writes:
> On the contrary, this request highlights the power and
> versatility and transferability of Unicode. You can have
> a Unicode text, which when using a "regular" Unicode
> font that includes the Greek range, displays in
> miniscule.

But you see, the information (Uncial) is lost. Why do I use an Uncial
font? To display some specialty of the Uncial. So, a display of some
minuscule font is of no value.


Perhaps one day the programs I use, e.g. Bibleworks and MS-Word, have
easy-to-use, well-documented, adjustable and built-in interfaces. Let's
wait and see ...

Best wishes
    Wieland
       <><
------------------------------------------------
Wieland Willker, Bremen, Germany
mailto:willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie
Textcritical commentary:
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/index.html

---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek





More information about the B-Greek mailing list