Re: Greek tonos and oxia

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jun 30 2004 - 18:08:23 CDT

  • Next message: Rick McGowan: "Re: Greek tonos and oxia"

    On 30/06/2004 11:18, busmanus wrote:

    > Peter Kirk wrote:
    >
    >> If you prefer to use precomposed characters
    >
    >
    > I need to use them at the moment, because my word
    > processor does not support the trickier aspects
    > of rendering combined glyphs (e.g. making use of
    > the "corner points", etc.). I can't even make it
    > use a precomposed ligature for a letter+combining
    > diacritical combination. Can you recommend anything
    > more advanced in this respect (if it doesn't qualify
    > as an ad)?
    >
    I'm not sure I quite understand your problem.

    If your word processor displays Unicode characters at all, it should
    display precomposed glyphs like the ones in the Extended Greek block -
    unless the word processor has built-in canonical decomposition, which
    seems improbable. I see from your message source that you are using
    Windows 98. On that system you should have no problem displaying
    Extended Greek in the built-in Wordpad, or with Microsoft Word (but this
    is not a Microsoft ad!) or (free) Open Office.

    But your system will not do a good job of rendering decomposed
    characters. It will neither combine them programmatically nor replace
    them with precomposed character glyphs. For proper rendering of
    decomposed characters you really need to upgrade to Office 2003 on
    Windows 2000 or XP. This is a good reason to use the precomposed
    characters instead.

    Ken Whistler's recommendation to use decomposed characters, which is
    probably only a personal one, does not make good sense at the present
    time with your particular system setup. In fact I am not sure when there
    would ever be a significant advantage in decomposed characters, as long
    as there is a precomposed font available. A perfect system would level
    the playing field by processing and rendering the two alternatives
    identically, making it essentially irrelevant which you choose.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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