[Biblical-languages] Re: Apostrophe / Coronis

Patrick Rourke ptrourke at methymna.com
Sun May 4 13:38:11 EDT 2003


> Only one concern: it is surely beyond the scope of a font to determine
> whether it is being used in a polytonic or monotonic context, so 
> presumably
> either a mechanism must be provided for these contexts to be marked, 
> or the
> font could be chosen depending on which context was required; i.e. if
> someone wanted the tonos to appear vertical, they could choose a font 
> in
> which it did, but this font would be unsuitable for polytonic text, and
> might even be clearly marked as such e.g. by not having glyphs for the 
> other
> accents.
>

Exactly. Either the user agent (word processor, email user agent, 
browser) should recognize the language context from some kind of markup 
and be able to choose the correct glyph set for that language (which is 
what the MS font designer told me they were doing to accommodate 
differences between modern polytonic typography in Greece and the 
typography of ancient Greek texts as practiced by modern typographers 
in Europe and NA - provide different glyphs for those characters, like 
the upper case vowels with iota subscript - in modern typography they 
are often placed directly below the vowel, even though traditionally 
they were always to the right and slightly below - which are different 
in different language contexts; whether this was ever in fact done 
remains to be seen), or the page designer (whether a printed page or a 
displayed page) should choose a first-choice font that harmonizes with 
the type of text used.  So if you are designing a font for use by 
classicists or biblical scholars, the basic Greek range monotonic 
characters should have identical glyphs to their (never used) polytonic 
precomposed equivalents.



> I am glad that Yannis' proposals are still in the works, as some of 
> them
> certainly should be approved, although others, the new precomposed
> characters he suggests, are superfluous in the light of recent font
> technology. Indeed, so is the entire Extended Greek range, as every
> character has a canonical decomposition - except for 1FBD, 1FBF, 1FC0 
> and
> 1FFE, for which the given compatibility decompositions ought to be
> canonical. But meanwhile it has been very useful temporarily, for 
> those of
> us who have been using older font technology, that these precomposed
> characters are available and supported by some fonts.

No additional precomposed Greek character/diacritical combinations will 
be added to Unicode; so it was decreed (yes, I asked).   My (possibly 
correct) understanding is that the ones that were added were added 
because at the time that Unicode 2.0 was promulgated, combining 
diacriticals were not effectively implemented in any of the major 
operating systems or applications.


> By the way, you might like to add Ezra SIL and Gentium to the list on 
> your
> website of fonts supporting polytonic Greek.

I'd be happy to, as soon as I have a chance. If you could send me a URL 
for folks to download from, and as much information as you feel would 
be helpful to me to provide an overview of the fonts - I have much more 
complete discussions of the existing fonts sitting somewhere on this 
computer waiting to be uploaded - I'll do so at the earliest 
opportunity. But I have to warn you that the earliest opportunity is 
pretty far off, I'm afraid.

(If they are paid fonts, then I'll need other information).

Thanks,
Patrick Rourke



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