Re: Accented Greek

[Alexandros Diamantidis <adia hellug gr>]

* Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> [2002-05-22 14:44]:
> 
> Adding the Greek compose sequences to the default input method can
> certainly be done. They are in there currently because they weren't in
> XFree86 when I created the current table.

I'm not sure when exactly they were added, but they are there
now, in xc/nls/Compose/iso8859-7.

> A more complex question (if not so immediately useful) is whether
> compose sequences for the "Greek Extended" characters in the 1F00
> block of Unicode should be added, or whether, instead, we should
> produce text with combining sequences.

A fellow Greek Linux user, Vasilis Vasaitis, has written a Perl script
that produces a compose table for polytonic Greek and has submitted it
to XFree86. It uses the precomposed forms, and works well. The only
problem is that the resulting table is quite long, about 1500 entries,
because it has to contain all dead key permutations. Does it matter? The
basic Greek compose sequences are 100 or so.

> (One reason this is not so immediately useful is that rendering of
> polytonic Greek using the current Pango shapers is very good. 

Do you mean that Pango can render polytonic Greek using combining
characters? I tried to test it with pango-viewer and gtk-demo, and
couldn't make it work. In both cases I got the base characters without
any diacritics. The underlying text was correct, since I could copy it
in an xterm and get the correct rendering there. Does/will Pango support
stacking arbitrary combining diacritics on Latin and Greek characters?

The procomposed "Greek Extended" characters indeed work very well.

> The other reason is that modern Greek is clearly more useful.)

Of course! I don't know anyone typing polytonic Greek directly in Unix -
those who need them use TeX - but since now it works, I'm sure people
will start using it more.

Anyway, aside of whether compose sequences for Greek should be added to
the Default input method, I think that making the X Input Method the
default for Greek locales is a good idea, since it allows both basic and
extended Greek to work without changing input methods, and it is a very
simple change.

-- 
Alexandros Diamantidis * adia hellug gr