These pages discuss issues to do with Greek and Unicode
that I have come across over the years, both in my
capacity as research associate of the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae and independently. This is not
of course the last word on Greek and Unicode, nor
indeed a comprehensive guide. That honour belongs,
in the first instance, to:
The TLG Unicode
Test page, which I maintain, and which contains
detailed information on the character coverage
of the various fonts I am familiar with.
Yannis
Haralambous' site. While Haralambous and I have
several ideological differences about Unicode and
Greek typography, the man is a professional typographer
with an excellent knowledge of the issues involved
in Classical and Modern Greek typesetting; take
what he says seriously, even if I don't always.
:-)
The information I give here is more of a supplementary
nature:
explanations of why Unicode has done things
the way it has (and will not do things the
way you might want it to);
some of the more obscure combinations
of characters and the stories behind them;
things
you will find out there in text converted
to Unicode to be wary of;
and general background information
of why Greek is so messy in Unicode.
So there
is
a
fair bit of paedagogy and pedantry here.
The audience I intend this for is people who will
be working with Greek Unicode at a non-trivial level,
either as programmers or as text encoders. The classicists
among you will I hope pardon me giving some introductions
to Ancient Greek here; I also go over aspects of
Greek typography, both within and outside Greece,
that I have seen over the years and that Unicoders
may need to be aware of.
I am not a typographer or a classicist, so of course
these web pages are no substitute for doing your
own reading on palaeography, typography, linguistics,
text encoding, philology, or politics. As this
site continues to be developed, I will be adding
links to other such material online, and to references,
as well as providing visual examples from existing
typography. This will take a while, as might be
clear.
Particular
'Gaps': Smooth breathing on capital upsilon;
Circumflex on epsilon and omicron; Circumflex
on capitals; Non-canonical subscripts; Smooth
Breathing on capital rho
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