[B-Greek] I have a simple issue...

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Jan 18 09:38:17 EST 2008


On Jan 17, 2008, at 6:47 PM, Kurt S. Steele wrote:

> I am humbly ask, why some of you I can see the greek letters in yoru  
> emails
> and others are english transliteration.  What do I need to do to  
> update my
> fonts?

We've been discussing this repeatedly and I've had numerous offlist  
questions about it too. I guess there's no avoidance of another round  
of responses to the question, but I'll try to make it short.

(1) If list-members follow list protocol, it doesn't matter whether  
you can see the Unicode Greek font at all, because there will always  
be a transliterated text accompanying any Greek-font text. It is  
abundantly evident that too many list-members have problems composing  
or displaying the Unicode Greek text for us to make use of the Greek  
Unicode formatting standard for messages on B-Greek as yet.

(2) In order to view Unicode Greek (or other non-Roman font) properly  
in e-mail, you must be (a) running an operating system that supports  
Unicode (I think that most Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems do so  
now), and (b) have your system and/or e-mail program configured  
properly to display the "text encoding"
Unicode (UTF-8). How this is done may vary from one e-mail program to  
another, but I think it's usually to be found in the preferences file  
and it probably also can be found under a "View" menu.

(3) It's my impression that it is harder to configure web-mail  
programs to compose and display messages in Unicode than it is to  
configure mail applications that compose and read e-mail offline, but  
I don't know whether that's really the case.

(4) One of the better online resources concerning Unicode -- regularly  
updated -- is: Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/index.html 
) -- but a Google search using the keyword "Unicode" will bring up a  
whole slew of resources.


Carl W. Conrad
Co-Chair, B-Greek List




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