Re: Accented Greek

[Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail yahoo com>]

 --- Alexandros Diamantidis <adia hellug gr> wrote: >
* 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.

I just wanted to mention that if polytonic Greek has
this problem then Vietnamese probably has it too
since both use a lot of combining characters.  In the
case of Vietnamese, even though Unicode supports
precomposed characters, legacy encodings do not and
converters only change the encoding, they don't do
any kind of normalization.  Pinyin romanization for
Chinese also uses combinations such as dieresis and
acute accent.

Andrew Dunbar.

> > 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
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=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com

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