Davide's Notes

I just installed the SPIonic font. This post is just to test that I can use and display it properly. I'll need to use the character mapping frequently, so I've put a shortcut link to it on the left.

a!ggeloj, a)me/n, a!nqrwpoj, a)po&stoloj, Galilai&a, grafh&, do&ca, e0gw&, e!sxatoj, zwh/, qeo/j, kai/, kardi/a, ko/smoj, lo/goj, pneu~ma, profh/thj, sa/bbaton, fwnh/, Xristo/j, 0Abraa/m, Daui/d, Pau~loj, Pe/troj, Pila~toj, Si/mwn

(uhm, not always clear when to use the narrow and when the wide char for a given mark - the wide one seems just more centered)

UPDATE (June 30, 2004): Many thanks Tim and Jim for your comments. Obviously I am totally ignorant about this. Anyway: I've tried to read a few things about the matter, and I have found the following pages especially useful:

• Unicode, by Rodney J. Decker
• Unicode Polytonic Greek for the World Wide Web, by the Stoa consortium

My goal is to be able to write short Greek (and later on Hebrew) sentences on this blog. I won't necessarily read my blog always from the same computer, and I won't necessarily have control on which OS or fonts are installed on the computer I use. So the comment from Tim is appropriate (and yes, not everybody reading this will have SP fonts installed, although as Jim points out most scholars do -- on the other hand, I do not expect this blog to be read by many scholars). Therefore, and having seen that the W3C considers the <font> tag deprecated (cf. in particular the "face" attribute), I think that a better solution is indeed to go Unicode.

Having said that, perhaps the SP mappings still retain their usefulness e.g. when exchanging vanilla text messages in mailing list/group discussions, so I'll leave the link to the mapping as a reference.

Now, the problem is the workflow to be adopted to write posts with Greek sentences without too many frustrations or complications. This is what I've done so far. If anybody has advices, corrections, etc., do not hesitate to write.

1. I've modified the CSS for this page to include the following: <style type="text/css"> <!-- .Latin {font-family: Palatino Linotype, Palatino, Clas Garamond, Garamond, Book Antiqua, Times New Roman, serif;} .Greek {font-family: Palatino Linotype, Arial Unicode MS, Athena, Lucida Sans Unicode;} //--> </style> (but I think I can remove the "Latin" style)
2. I've installed Tavultesoft Keyman 6.0 and the Classical Greek keyboard mapping. This is on Windows XP; I still don't know how to enter Greek unicode characters in Linux.
3. When writing Greek sentences, I enclose them between <div class="Greek"> and </div> tags. I noticed that when displaying Greek text on my Linux workstation it does not make a difference whether I use these tags or not (probably because the browser falls down to a default Unicode font anyway, which is not really nice-looking - maybe it also does not have all glyphs). In Windows, leaving out the <div> tags makes the text to have an italic sort-of slant.
4. I was already using an HTML editor to compose especially my longer posts. It seems that Mozilla Composer handles Unicode well, so that's what I am going to use in this case. I can just copy and paste to the Blogger post. On the other hand, when Keyman is enabled I can directly type in Greek text in the Blogger post as well, and this is handy when I don't need an HTML editor.

To test all of this, these are the same Greek words I had put in my original post, this time using Unicode characters:


For reference, I have linked to the left bar the Keyman keyboard mapping and the README (the latter has notes on the accent marks).