[B-Greek] Unicode and other font isssues

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Oct 7 19:55:54 EDT 2006


On Oct 7, 2006, at 1:55 PM, Dan Storm wrote:

> All,
>
> I know this has been discussed before, but I've never understood.
>
> Often when folks post to BGreek they use the transliteration scheme  
> with all caps, e.g. LOGOS. Other times all I get is question marks  
> and sometimes other characters. Are their settings wrong, or mine,  
> or both? FWIW, I am on a PC running WinXP Pro, and I use Outlook  
> Express for email.

(1) Our FAQ requires that Greek text be transliterated into plain- 
text ASCII; the suggested scheme calls for upper-case letters to be  
used to represent the Greek characters with a lower-case "h" for a  
rough breathing and a lower-case "i" for an Iota subscript following  
A, H, or W. The whole scheme is clearly spelled out in the FAQ at

     http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/faq.txt

and there's also on that main BG Home page a handy diagram of  
transliteration equivalents using the standard BG scheme.

(2) The moderators of B-Greek have ruled that the list is not yet  
ready for regular use of Unicode font for representation of Greek  
characters; some list-members do want to use it and we have not  
objected to that, PROVIDED ONLY that they accompany any text typed in  
Unicode characters to be accompanied by the transliteration using our  
standard scheme.

(3) Not all e-mail programs display Unicode fonts properly and some  
do not at all (I personally switched reluctantly away from Eudora  
because it will not display Unicode). A mail program that does NOT  
display Unicode properly or that is not configured properly will  
display what was intended to be Unicode as question-marks or as  
something else that isn't legible or certainly not legible as
Greek characters. It's also true that some have attempted to type  
Unicode into mail that hasn't been properly configured for  
transmission on the Internet. Whatever your e-mail program, I think  
that it does need to be configured properly in your preferences for  
the Unicode to display properly. I'm sure that somebody using Outlook  
Express with the Windows operating system can answer the question  
about configuring your e-mail to display Unicode properly.

In any case, list-members are advised that the transliteration scheme  
for plain-text ASCII letters to represent Greek text is still  
standard for B-Greek; if one wishes to type text in Unicode, one  
should nevertheless add the transliterated text for the sake of those  
whose mail programs will not display the Unicode fonts properly.


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




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