[B-Greek] Sending messages in Greek font

Timothy S. Nelson wayland at wayland.id.au
Wed Dec 16 17:46:07 EST 2009


On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Marilyn Phemister wrote:

> Would someone please write to me privately and tell me what I need to do
> to be able to post to B-Greek with the Greek font I see here?  I have a
> Greek font that is available with my Thunderbird mailer, but I'm not
> sure it is the same, and I can't find the breathing marks or accents.

 	I use Linux, so I can't help unless you're also doing the same, but I 
thought I'd mention a couple of general points to you (and post to the list so 
it will show up if someone searches the archives).

 	My first point is that I recommend having a Greek keyboard layout on 
your computer.  This means that your keyboard can be in either "English mode", 
or "Greek Mode".  You will have to "sacrifice" a key to be the mode switching 
key.  I've sacrificed the "Scroll Lock" key myself, but there are other 
popular choices (usually ones in the same row as the space bar, I believe). 
I'd recommend not sacrificing either "Alt" key, because, at least on my Greek 
layout, the left one is needed as an "Alt" key, and the right one is needed as 
a "Level 3" key (don't worry about what a "Level 3" key is just now, though).

 	As for using a Greek font, let me explain just briefly about how 
computers do things like this.

 	In the bad old days, it was only possible to have 256 characters in a 
font.  Because these were used for things like eg. Latin-1 [1], there wasn't 
enough room for the Greek letters.  So the old way was to use those exact same 
numbers for the Greek letters, but then each computer had to know what font to 
use.

[1] Latin-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1

 	Then, someone invented Unicode.  This allowed for maybe 2^32 (= 4 US 
billion) different characters.  This meant that the Greek characters could 
have their own separate characters, instead of using the same ones with a 
different font.  While there are very few (maybe no?) fonts that support all 
the currently defined characters, the Greek ones are quite popular, so many 
fonts contain them, at least in more recent versions (for example Times New 
Roman keeps adding new characters with each version of Windows -- unless 
it's Office, I forget).

 	Personally I use a font called "Linux Libertine"[2].  It's free, and 
can be used on any operating system that supports TTF.

[2] Linux Libertine: http://linuxlibertine.sourceforge.net/Libertine-EN.html#download

 	This means that you can (with a modern font), go into some kind of 
Character Map (in OpenOffice Writer, this is going to the "Insert" menu, and 
choosing something like "Special character" -- IIRC MS Word has something 
similar), scroll down until you find the Greek, and choose the characters you 
want, then later paste them into a different program.

 	Personally, I'd find this tedious in the extreme, so I'd suggest that 
after testing this, you get a Greek keyboard layout.

 	If you get a Greek keyboard layout, you can also get stickers that go 
on your keys.  The ones for a black keyboard with white writing are here:

http://www.hooleon.com/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=KBH&Product_Code=OV-0673

 	...and the ones for a pale keyboard with black writing can be found by 
going to the above link, and then looking for the product (at the bottom of 
the page) and clicking the link.

 	HTH,


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| Name: Tim Nelson                 | Because the Creator is,        |
| E-mail: wayland at wayland.id.au    | I am                           |
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