jjake@reed.UUCP (Jacob Sisk) (04/12/89)
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. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jacob Sisk jjake@reed.BITNET Box 798 REED COLLEGE Portland, Or. 97202
dcarson@cisunx.UUCP (David Carson) (04/15/89)
In article <12413@reed.UUCP> jjake@reed.UUCP (Jacob Sisk) writes: >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. >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. One fix is to use Silvio Levy's Greek font for TeX. It can be found in the Unix distribution of TeX under the "babel" directory. It includes all the diacritical marks, as well as defining a Greek environment which takes care of some of the dirty work very nicely. This environment allows you to type a single accent character before an appropriate vowel, for example, rather than having to type the backslash character as well. It also allows you to always type an `s' regardless of where you are in the word, and the appropriate sigma will be used. There are other niceties as well. You can switch back and forth between English and Greek with no problem. The only problem you may encounter is that the fonts are 256-character fonts, and some device drivers do not properly handle them. This has been changing, however, since the first 256-char fonts came out. The newer drivers should handle the fonts. I have used them and they work great! Thanks to Silvio Levy. David Carson Internet: dcarson@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu BITNet: dcarson@PITTVMS