[B-Greek] little problem

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Mar 19 17:51:33 EDT 2009


On Mar 19, 2009, at 5:32 PM, jerry wrote:

> I'm a systems engineer. And it's very doubtful that there are  
> functioning systems today that will not support unicode fonts. I  
> don't know of any. So maybe it is time to pull the group out of the  
> stone age, even if we do have a propensity and fondness for that  
> time period.
>
> The level of scholarship here is superlative and warrants operating  
> at the highest level, not at a low level aiming at three or four  
> total systems (literally) out in the world that may not be able to  
> handle unicode.
>
> What you are actually saying is that there may be people who don't  
> want to ask a friend how to do it, which is a shame.
>
> jerry

We go through this discussion again and again every two or three  
months (sometimes the interval is greater). I don't think the problem  
is really just that people are still using systems that don't support  
unicode fonts. I switched to a mail program that I don't like as well  
as Eudora because Eudora didn't support unicode fonts (the current  
post-Qualcomm version 8 does, but it still hasn't reached its optimal  
format yet, evidently). The problem is that some people have a real  
difficulty learning, some people just don't want to type Greek whether  
in a Greek font or in transliteration, and some who want to paste  
Greek text in either put it into a text-format that isn't set to utf-8  
encoding or they copy it from a pre-unicode font. For one reason or  
another too many list-members who want to post just haven't come to  
understand the relatively simple technological adjustments needed to  
make sure that the unicode Greek displays properly. Until the  
moderators of B-Greek are satisfied that there's no longer a problem,  
we'll continue with the current regulations regarding citation of  
Greek texts.


Carl W. Conrad
Co-Chair, B-Greek List
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu or cwconrad2 at mac.com





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