[B-Greek] UTF

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Fri Jan 7 14:13:54 EST 2005


I think George (and my) confusion was that in the first half you seem to be
wanting to translate a particular font from being non-Unicode to Unicode but
in the second half you seem to be wanting to translate documents to Unicode
so they students can use a Unicode font.

Minor corrections (although they might help explain some things):

1. it doesn't make sense to speak of a font as UTF, only as Unicode. Saying
a font is Unicode means that the characters have been assigned numbers (or
more precisely character codes) in accordance with the Unicode standard
rather than some other standard or a proprietary mapping.

2. the term UTF (really there is UTF-7, UTF-8 and UTF-16) applies to
document encoding, not fonts. Each of the UTFs is a particular way of
writing out the Unicode character codes.

Hope this clarified things, although not answering your original question.

James Tauber



On 8/1/05 1:07 AM, "George F Somsel" <gfsomsel at juno.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 09:43:12 -0500 Jim West <jwest at highland.net> writes:
>> Listers,
>> is there any way of converting a true type font to a UTF font (or is
>> that 
>> even possible)?  I have a font (greek parse) and wish to use it on a
>> greek 
>> course for the web- so instead of asking students to d/l the
>> particular 
>> font I understand that most computers now read UTF.
>> 
>> I apologize for the ignorance of the question and its probably not
>> even put 
>> rightly.
>> 
>> Jim
> ________________
> 
> I'm assuming that you're talking about changing the coding for a Greek
> legacy font (one that uses the same keyboard mapping as, e.g. English) so
> that it is unicode compliant.  There is not problem with reassigning the
> glyphs to different codes, but I've certainly never done it so I don't
> know how much difficulty there would be.  I suspect that there would be
> more problem with receiving permission from the copyright holder to do
> so.  But why go to this bother?  There are a number of unicode fonts
> which cover polytonic Greek so there is no need to do so unless you have
> special needs  such as Wieland Wilker mentioned with his presentation of
> the early codices of the NT.  I believe it was Ken Penner who mentioned a
> program which could convert these legacy texts to unicode (you would
> still need to use one of the newer unicode fonts, not the same old font).
>  What is involved in this is basically a search and replace operation.
> 
> george
> gfsomsel
> ___________
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