[Biblical-languages] Text processing of Greek in a large batc h of files

Peter Kirk peterkirk at qaya.org
Thu Sep 4 14:01:21 EDT 2003


On 04/09/2003 12:20, biblang at ntresources.com wrote:

> Thanks for the several very helpful responses. I'll reply to all of 
> them here together.
>
> One of the issues I deal with is legacy data--and I'm only one person 
> who is teaching a reasonably normal load--with no support staff to do 
> this sort of mechanical "donkey work." And my skill set is limited, 
> mostly what I've learned on my own.
>
I understand. In fact I am in much the same position, though I have 
learned a lot from my former SIL colleagues.

> I'm moving toward Unicode, but part of that entails translating all my 
> legacy data files from the (several) proprietary font encodings into 
> Unicode (I have files in Graeca/II, Mounce, & my own Galilee font). 
> Perhaps there are easy ways to do that, but I don't know of any other 
> than manually re-keying it all (using Keyman to enter the Unicode 
> text). If there are any customizable means of doing such conversions, 
> I'd sure like to know about it.
>
SIL has published a set of encoding converters which do what you want, 
in a number of ways including from MS Word. See 
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=EncCnvtrs. 
You will have to set up your own conversion table(s), but you can use 
the supplied SIL Galatia one as a model which should make it fairly 
simple. It would be very good if someone could start a collection of 
conversion tables for common Greek (and other) legacy fonts.

An alternative way of doing the same thing (for Greek and Coptic only, 
the Hebrew doesn't work with current MS software) which may come with 
the tables you need is Antioch, from 
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/antioch.htm.

> ...
>
> As to ""<font face = "Galilee">" is illegal HTML, a Microsoft 
> extension, which is unlikely to work with non-Microsoft browsers" ...
>
> That's how I learned to do it years ago. (It does work fine on both IE 
> and Netscape on both Windows and Mac.) I gather that CSS avoids this 
> problem. So I'll have some reworking to do there also--and all that 
> legacy data to revise. Sigh.
>
It's not guaranteed to work, but I think Netscape was forced to support 
it because it is so widely used. It's something to do with that "allow 
documents to use other fonts" check box. But it looks like you are 
forced to prefer MS anyway, though that won't stop some students trying 
to use Netscape, Mozilla etc.



-- 
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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