[Biblical-languages] Greek monotonic and polytonic characters
Joseph Weaks
j.weaks at tcu.edu
Tue Dec 7 14:53:42 EST 2004
On Nov 18, 2004, at 6:15 AM, Patrick T Rourke wrote:
> ...Normalization Form C, which is the one recommended by the World
> Wide Web Consortium for online use, and which I'd personally recommend
> for use in all situations except where it is not technically feasible,
> mandates that the "monotonic" characters be used in preference to the
> polytonic ones where they are available.
>
> Unfortunately, many font creators have misunderstood the Unicode
> Consortium's very strong warning that the letterforms depicted in the
> code charts are not normative, and have created fonts with
> monotonic-style tonoi for the basic Greek block and polytonic-style
> acutes for the polytonic block after its example. This has lead most
> users and publishers to distinguish between these characters when the
> same letterform should be used for both sets of characters. The font
> creator must decide...
Yes, so the font creators must get their act straight. But what about
us encoding texts or creating unicode keyboards... Are we supposed to
bull-headedly adopt the monotonic range accented character (tonos) when
doing encoding instead of an acute (oxia) from the extended range?
Because, since the current state of fonts out there uses the incorrect
font character for the accent in the monotonic range, the result will
be poor. Even more so, when I distribute a keyboard map to a user, it
will look like MY fault that the alpha with an acute looks bad.
Joe Weaks
**************************************************************
Rev. Joseph A. Weaks
Senior Minister, Bethany Christian Church, Dallas
Ph.D. (Cand.), Brite Divinity School, Ft. Worth
j.weaks at tcu.edu
**************************************************************
More information about the Biblical-languages
mailing list