[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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