[B-Greek] UTF

Joseph Weaks j.weaks at tcu.edu
Fri Jan 7 14:55:11 EST 2005


On Jan 7, 2005, at 1:30 PM, William Zeitler wrote:
> Actually, both. ...If the document uses an
> encoding schema that doesn't match the font's, you get a mess.
>
> Even within Unicode there are different schemas (e.g. Normalization 
> Form C
> vs. D, which are specifically concerned with diacritical marks).

While close to true, this form of description is unnecessary and even 
misleading to someone like the original poster. Any Greek converter 
will use the polytonic characters of Normalization Form C. The 
explanation needs be something closer to what James said:

Dear Jim,
You need to convert the text of the document from the legacy font 
format to Unicode characters. Legacy font types are the older types we 
all used (with combinations such as a/ was an alpha with acute). 
Instead of that type of setup, a Unicode character is stored in an 
extended format so that virtually every known character form in the 
modern and ancient world can exist in one text and even in the same 
font (instead of switching from Palatino to Greek Parse every time the 
language changes).
Converters are readily available for some of the most common legacy 
font texts, but I've never heard of Greek Parse. You can even do the 
conversions by hand, using Find/Replace, but you'll only be able to do 
any of this if your operating system and text processor is capable of 
working with Unicode.  Also, manner of conversion would depend upon 
whether or not the entire document is in this Greek font, or whether 
it's mixed between English and Greek.
Answer that question and also let us know what format the Greek Parse 
text is similar to and someone can get you on your way to creating a 
solution that might be a slight bit of work to set up but will then be 
nearly instantaneous to repeat with as many documents as you wish.

HTH,
Joe

**************************************************************
Rev. Joseph A. Weaks
Senior Minister, Bethany Christian Church, Dallas
Ph.D. (Cand.), Brite Divinity School, Ft. Worth
j.weaks at tcu.edu
**************************************************************




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