[sword-devel] Greek texts

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Paul,
	B-Greek encoding was created by the list to display greek fonts in an
english character set (email) for the mailing list.  We have a converter
(see sword/src/utilfuns/Greek2Greek) written by a the B-Greek mailing
list people (William Dicks).  It is used in our WIN32 frontend.  If you
are in the N27U4 module and you highlight text and then right-click, you
will get an option, "Copy as B-Greek" then you can paste into your mail
program and the greek will conform to the standard that the list uses.

I wouldn't think that encoding in B-Greek a text for display in true
diacritic greek would be that efficient since there cannot be a direct
font mapping.  The diacritics are encoded as a separate character and
the frontend would have to either transpose the images on the fly or
else parse and map to a single character on the fly.

Our N27U4 module was converted from bromans CCAT archive to what was
originally called 'wingreek' encoding (this is the encoding that the
Greek2Greek functions expect for conversion).  Many texts use this
encoding and there are and ample number of converters from this encoding
to other encodings.

		-Troy.



Paul Gear wrote:
> 
> Chris Little wrote:
> >
> > With the exception of our locked NA27/UBS4 B-Greek text, which was I believe
> > produced by Troy, I did all the Greek texts using the files from Broman.
> > There are, I've been made aware, problems in the character mapping and
> > probably the transliteration as well (things like Chis and Xis swapped).
> 
> Grrr!  Don't get me started!  :-)  Actually you have gotten me started -
> see below.
> 
> > So I really wouldn't mind revisiting the whole Greek text subject and
> > redoing them all.
> 
> Well, neither would i.  I want to make them much more readable (with
> capitals, punctuation, etc.) and include morph codes, though.
> Interested in working on a database?  I've already collected some texts
> and made a start on the data model.
> 
> > I'd also like to get away from using Symbol as a font, even
> > though it's pre-loaded on every Windows box.
> 
> Easy on Windows - just provide a different font.  Hard on Linux - what
> other font are you going to use?  How are you going to ensure that it's
> present on everyone's Linux box?  Are you going to force frontend
> developers to use FreeType and a particular TTF, or just let them work
> it out themselves?  Are you going to make everyone use xfsft?  What
> about other platforms?
> 
> > I'm certainly open to suggestions of what new texts and character mappings
> > should be used to create new versions of these.
> 
> For theta, psi, chi, and upsilon, use the scheme adhered to by the
> B-Greek discussion list
> <http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek/transliteration.txt>.  They do not
> distinguish the final sigma.
> 
> There are commercial fonts that use the B-Greek mapping:
> - Bwgrkl (from BibleWorks, i think)
> - Linguists Software's Graeca/GraecaII (from http://www.logos.com)
> - Galaxie Software's Greek <http://www.bible.org/galaxie>.
> The latter two map the final sigma to double quotes ("), while Bwgrkl
> uses lowercase v.
> 
> The free fonts that are available around the place have some rather
> silly mappings:
> - SIL Galatia maps H to rough breathing and J to eta (i understand why,
> but i think lookalike should override soundalike in this case, since
> rough breathing isn't a letter)
> - OLBGrk maps Q and Y the other way around
> - SPIonic swaps X and C (God only knows why)
> 
> I've recently found a couple of (seemingly free) Greek fonts that use
> the B-Greek mapping:
> - EGreek
> <http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Egerton/egerton-greek.html>.  No
> license seems to be attached to this.
> - GreekFP <http://www.paradigm-sw.com/gfp/font.htm>.
> 
> The latter is a better quality font and uses the same final sigma as
> "Graeca" and "Greek", but the vendor probably needs to be contacted to
> ensure that we would be able to redistribute the font.  It says it is
> available for non-commercial use only (which presumably we qualify for),
> but there isn't any indication as to whether redistribution is permitted
> or anything like that.
> 
> I think B-Greek encoding is the way to go - make people who want to use
> something different convert with a font map.  This gives the best chance
> of readable output if no Greek font is available.
> 
> Final sigma is a hard one - you could either encode it as a double
> quote, or not distinguish it and let the frontend programs deal with the
> problem by mapping an S at the end of a word to the appropriate
> character for their font (or maybe do nothing).
> 
> Paul
> ---------
> "He must become greater; i must become less." - John 3:30
> http://www.bigfoot.com/~paulgear