jjake@reed.UUCP (Jacob Sisk) (04/13/89)
I have a question which I will throw up to any one who can answer it. Among other things, I study Ancient Greek, and have access to a number of machine readable texts. I would very much like to be able to incorporate greek text into, say, a paper without too much trouble. The text itself is stored as plain old text, with a number of odd characters for letters that the Roman alphabet does not have. These would be easy to map to whatever they need to. I have tried using Troff and inquired about TeX, but nobody seems to know an easy fix to switch from Roman to Greek fonts. The problem is further complicated by a system of diacritic marks (invented by 2nd century monks to retain the accent and sound of Classical Greek), and these are a real sticking point, or so says my math prof who uses TeX quite extensively. Does any one have some idea as to how I can do this using current Unix type-setting tools? My thanks would be endless to the person who can help me. ps: Sorry if this article happens twice; I am still getting the hang of 'Pnews'. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jacob Sisk jjake@reed.BITNET Box 798 REED COLLEGE Portland, Or. 97202
lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (04/15/89)
From article <12423@reed.UUCP>, by jjake@reed.UUCP (Jacob Sisk): " " Among other things, I study Ancient Greek, and have access to a number " of machine readable texts. I would very much like to be able to " incorporate greek text into, say, a paper without too much trouble. How about writing a preprocessor using lex? Settle on a convention for marking Greek portions of text, for instance enclose them in brackets, and have the preprocessor remove the marks and translate the Greek portions with TeX markups as appropriate. If you haven't used lex and this sounds like a good idea, if you were to send me some sample text with information about what TeX commands make the Greek look right, I could whip up a prototype. I think this approach would be much easier than trying to do it directly with TeX or troff code. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
vlo@taipei.Princeton.EDU (John Vlontzos) (04/16/89)
Try the collection of greek macros in princeton.edu (anon. ftp, dir greek)
There are also regular greek characters with all necessary
ligatures, accents etc. (not the regular TeX math font).
You write greek either as
\begin{greek}
Andra moi enepe mousa polutropon ....
\end{greek}
or by using the \greekdelims command. In this case,
the above text would be:
@Andra moi enepe mousa polutropon ...@
Caution: since the fonts contain more than 128 characters (because
of ligatures), you need dvialw (from science.utah.edu -- Beebe collection)
dvi2ps won't work.
John Vlontzos
Princeton