Let's first consider the primary problem:
Publishing classical greek on the www.
Besides UNicode, there is the possibility to use LaTeX for this purpose.
The kdgr-fonts are now pretty standard (the [modern] greek babel package
uses them). Publication formats include LaTeX source, dvi and ps-files.
The quality of the result is very good, the formatting is fixed by LaTeX
and under the complete control of the author.
If you are going plain HTML and UNicode, my answers are:
- Which transfer-encoding is most widely understood?
UTF-8 -- at least if the recipient has appropriate fonts on their system.
Otherwise any format will fail.
- How to code diacritical marks, such as accents, breathing-marks,
and iota subscript?
Precomposed (if ever possible). Many rendering agents will be unable to do
any composing.
- How to code breathing marks and, optionally, accents with
**upper-case** vowels? These are written left of their base
characters, so there are various possibilities:
Logic suggest to use the fully precomposed form here, too. I see no reason
to escape to >>visual formatting<< by detaching the accents.
- How to code iota subscript with **upper-case** vowels
(the iota should be written at the lower right of the base
character, as iota adscript)?
<Sigh> Fully precomposed could be a good choice, if the glyphs given in the
UNicode looked like the author and the reader expect. I am afraid, a
UNicode font will have the UNicode book's glyphs and thus look wrong.
Therefore I'd go for
- separate, ordinary iota (U+03B9)
</Sigh>
--J"org Knappen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:39 EDT