Haralambous, Yannis

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On TeX and Greek…
Yannis Haralambous
To cite this version:
Yannis Haralambous. On TeX and Greek…. Tugboat, TeX Users Group, 1991, 12 (2), pp.224-226.
￿hal-02100292￿
TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991), No. 2 
O n  TJ$% a n d  Greek . .  . 
Yannis Haralambous 
1 Some  historical background 
The first person who made greek characters for 
was D. E. Knuth; each CM font contains the greek 
uppercase characters. These are excellent for greek 
text as well as for mathematics. Only two remarks 
could be made: first, the 'Y is actually a calligraphic 
form of Y and the latter is more frequently used in 
Greece; second, the typewriter T, A ,  . . ., .Q don't have 
much in common with greek typewriting. 
Knuth also did the well known lowercase greek 
characters a ,  /3 . . . w for use in mathematics. These 
are not suitable for greek text. 
The American Mathematical Society added a 
digamma (F), probably for the sake of completeness 
(the author would be interested to  find out in which 
area of mathematics a digamma is or could be used). 
Then came Silvio Levy [1], who created an en- 
tirely new family of greek fonts (roman, slanted, 
boldface, typewri ter) .  These fonts are partly 
coded in 8-bit and Silvio uses ligatures and macros 
to  obtain the characters in the ASCII range 129-256. 
As a matter of fact, Silvio's idea was to have as 
many combinations of accents, breathings and sub- 
script iota as possible and at the same time integrate 
a new feature concerning sigmas, namely an auto- 
matic choice between the medial o and the final <. 
For this. he included every possible combination a 
+ (character) as characters of the font (obtained by 
ligatures) and defined s to  be < in all other cases. 
This is a brillant idea, but has a major disadvan- 
tage: instead of 2 font positions a, 5 it needs 58. 
This forces him, because of lack of space, to use the 
\accent primitive in the case of the combination 
(breathzng) + (grave accent) (", "). Of course. as 
he already points out, this doesn't harm hyphen- 
ation since these accent combinations appear only 
on monosyllables. Also, Silvio announced an hy- 
phenation table. without specifying for which kind 
of Greek. 
A year later, Klaus Thull and the author [2] 
made some changes to Silvio's fonts: 
reducing them to 128 characters, because of 
problems with some drivers, 
making a new family of one-accent fonts (the 
official system in Greece), 
adding a SMALL CAPITALS font, a few ancient 
greek characters (F, F, 5, q. h, A) and hyphen- 
ation patterns for modern "post-1974" greek 
( F ~ L O T L X T ~ ) .  
2 W h a t  comes next  
Since the release of T@ 3.0, many efforts have been 
undertaken to establish standards for 256-character 
CM fonts. These fonts - or at least tentative versions 
of them-have been presented in Cork 1990 and in 
Vienna 1991 and contain a maximum of accented 
characters to suit most of the occidental languages. 
Besides supporting 8-bit input, the new lQ,X 
also allows hyphenation of different languages in the 
same document. In this way, soon we will have dif- 
ferent pattern tables included in the plain format of 
the standard m-distr ibut ion.  As a matter of fact, 
Mike Ferguson has proposed to coordinate such a 
collection of hyphenation patterns. 
And what about greek? Before considering hy- 
phenation problems, a standard font table should be 
fixed! I think it is time to take this step: choosing a 
standard greek font table and starting to work with 
it. In the appendix of this note, I propose a font ta- 
ble. All combinations of characters, accents, breath- 
i n g ~  and subscript iota are present as individual 
characters, reached by ligatures. Special symbols by 
Oxford in epigraphical texts [3] are included. Note 
that positions '013 and '040 are blank on purpose 
to maintain compatibility with Post Script fonts1. 
Of course this is just a proposal and I would like 
to collect your opinions and ideas. Other possible 
choices are: 
1. Silvio's font table (see [I ,  p. 24]), 
2. the greek standard 8-bit ASCII code, 
3. greek PC (for example [4, p. 2121) or Macintosh 
(greek family script) 8-bit ASCII code, and fi- 
nally 
4. an entirely new one. 
Choices 2 and 3 are more "open to the outside 
world" but have a major disadvantage: they don't 
contain all characters needed for classical greek. 
Concerning multi-accent and one-accent sys- 
tems. I think it is only natural to share the same 
font table (in the second case all breathings and 
the subscript iota will be missing and all accents re- 
placed by the "universal accent", which also needs to 
be standardized!). Of course many greek 'I)-$-users 
will say that Lmulti-accented characters are only old 
junk'; I would answer that the first principle of Q$ 
is universality. therefore the fonts used for classical 
or modern greek should be compatible. 
Have you ever tried to use cmrlO in Illustra- 
tor 3.0? 
TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991). No. 2 
3 Problems. 
Besides a choice of the font table, there are some 
problems which should be discussed, concerning the 
transliteration of Greek in 7-bit ASCII. The latter 
can still be useful for electronic mail and other me- 
dia or devices which don't allow 8-bit. I think that 
Silvio's transliteration 
has become a standard (I still get messages from 
people using x for X, t h  for 0, y for u. which can cause 
quite a confusion. . .). In [2] a slight modification to 
Silvio's transliteration is proposed: c for <. I have 
another modification to propose: v, V for the letter 
digamma r, F. This is some kind of rehabilitation 
of this Ietter, which was rather common in some 
ancient greek idioms (who would deny the beauty of 
Sapfo's 
ixhhb xby ykv $6oaa  ye. hkxzov 
6' crS~rxu ~ p 6 ~  x6p bxabe6p6yaxev, 
6xxkreor 6' 066' Ev dpprjp' Ex~pp6y/3e~or 
[ 6' &xouar) 
But there is a problem: the circumflex accent. Sil- 
vio encodes it as " which-at least visually-is the 
most natural choice. But " is active in TEX and 
plays an important r81e in line breaking. Silvio 
has to enclose greek text inside a group where is 
non-active; this brings several inconveniences, which 
could be avoided. I propose to change the translit- 
eration of the circumflex accent. The next most 
natural choice would be ^ (in french "accent czr- 
conflexe "). But unfortunately, the same problem 
would appear. If you look at the standard ASCII 
table (see 15. p. 3671) only the four characters *, 
+, =, I are possible choices. The characters * and I 
should be eliminated because of their uses in various 
m-construct ions.  Only + and = remain unused. 
Therefore I propose = as a 7-bit transliteration of 
the circumflex accent. A sequence like 
no6 nijye b (ijAo< z6v nuXr6v fiyep3v; 
would be typed as 
Po=u p=hge <o z=hloc t=wn pali=wn 
<hmer=wn? 
For the minor inconvenience of typing $=$ when you 
really want a =2 you will be using greek fonts in a 
straightforward manner, like CM fonts. 
according to Knuth (15, p. 511): You can also 
type + and =, to get the corresponding symbols + 
and =; but it's much better to use such characters 
Similar problems arise with diaeresis (F~ahuzLxci) 
and subscript iota (bxoyeypcryyivq). All this has to 
be discussed. 
4 A Greek TEX Users (sub-) Group 
There is a lot of work which remains to be done 
-and more and more people wanting to use for 
greek, and potentially being able to contribute - : 
hyphenation tables should be made according 
to 7&X 3.0 and the new standard font (once 
it's established). The recent release of a greek 
dictionnary on electronic media should be ex- 
ploited; 
0 I4m and AMSTEX styles should be created; 
0 new fonts, like a typewri ter  font which would 
look like greek typewriting, and sans-serifs 
should be made; 
0 greek Postscript fonts should be gathered and 
the corresponding . tfm files created. They then 
could be used as virtual fonts; 
0 introductory and w-educa t iona l  material 
should be translated to greek; and finally the 
most important: 
0 all this should be gathered, ordered, docu- 
mented and made available by the maximum 
number of servers. Some part of it could also 
be included in the standard 7QX distribution. 
And before even starting, there should be a solid 
discussion on the standardization problems I men- 
tioned in previous sections. 
Therefore I solemnly propose the creation of 
some structure (or sub-structure of TUG) which will 
take the responsibility for distributing and coordi- 
nating the tasks. Please send me your opinions, 
ideas and proposals, either to my bitnet address or 
to my physical address. I propose that the deadline 
(minus a week) for submission of technical papers 
for the first regular issue of TUGboat, volume 13 
(November 19), be a (tentative) deadline for your 
answers, after which I'll collect the informations and 
statistics, and announce them through the TUGboat 
(that is, after agreement of the editorial board). 
I especially invite 7&X users in Greece to con- 
tact me, because of my lacunary knowledge on TEX- 
activities in Greece. 
5 Say it in Greek.. . 
Kui ozh ihhqvrxb rhpcr: npi3za ixx'8hu 8b ij0eha vh 
~BppimZJjoo zobq kx66ze< TOG TUGboat xob yo6 kdzpe- 
+crv vh txppaor6 orb ihhqvixb yiou bx'zi< atfjheq TOG 
xepro6rxo6. KL uBtb y ~ b  vb ~ p o t ~ i v o ,  pk mb xohhfi 
signs, since that tells to insert the proper spac- 
ing for mathematics. only in math mode, i.e., enclosed between two $ 
TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991), No. 2 
Zprgaoq vb ouvepyao00i,pe b~or  phb yrb vb rgtrb~oupe EVU 
ihhqvrxb xoL vb ~~x~pvdrer ziq v6ppeq zGv Fru(g6pov 
xopi jv ,  vb E Z V ~ L  xorvb yrL. t b  bpxaiu xai tb  via, xui xot 
vb ~xptahke~e ta r  Bheg ti; 8uvaz6tqre< G v  kxexzdroeov 
zoi, m: UT@, AMS-W x.8.x. 
IIpoqyoupivog bvtcpepa prb oerpL. &xb Lpyuoieg xoL 
npfxer hx6pcr vb yivouv. Nopirw 8tr p6vo pk prb 
Bpyavopkvq xpooxh0era pxopo6pe vb drvraxe~ih~oup~ 
a' u h b  zb Zpyo, ak xexepaapkvo ~p6vo. IIpoteivw horxbv 
xpijta vb xdrvo prb xatcryparqfi 
0 toi, xu& x6aov ~ A E T E ,  bhhb xai pxopeite vb 
PO$~OET&. 
'Exiaqg xpoteivw z+p "Ipwq prh< ihhqvrxfjq BphFuq 
rgihwv3 to6 m, EITE abv bxoop&baq sob Q X  Users 
Group, J t e  &ve&ptqtqq (tb dvopcr 0b pxopoi,ae vb elvar 
E Q m :  "Ehhqveq aihor to5 T@ ij xdrtr uhko). ABtb 
0b xpow0oGae t f iv  auvepyaoia4 xai 0b Freuxdhuve 24v 
xhqpocpcipqoq t i j v  B~okva xai xib xohhdv -'Ehh.ijvwv 
xui &WV-- XOL 0khouv vb yp&+ouv otb 'Ehhqvrxb pk tb 
w. 
Biig xpoaxahij horxbv vb 66aete Fuvuprxb tb xapbv 
xui vb poi, petargkpet~ ziq bx6+erq, iFkeg, xai xpoxavtbq 
ti5 xpozdraerq aorq. 'Exioqq xpopAkxovtar ourqt.ijaerq 
xdrvo o'cibtb tb 0fpa otb BuvkFpra to5 T@ xoL 0b 
yivouv atb Dedham (HIIA) ad; 15 pk 18 'Iouhiou, otb 
nupior otiq 23 $ 26 Cexzepppiou xui utb 'Appobpyo 
(xcrtb xhaa xr0av6tqta) x&xote rb (p0rv6xwpo to6 1991. 
6 And a motto 
Following the tradition of the The W b o o k  of plac- 
ing the motto at  the end, here is mine:5 
Ti5 terqp086~ouq xheioav ok %pup$ axqkrb 
xai phq xouhhve Lvkaerq eB0upia~. 
o Yannis Haralambous 
101/11, rue Breughel 
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq 
France 
FAX: +33 20 91 05 64 
Bitnet: yannisQfrcitl81 
dour (pihog; yive pkhog!. . . 
f l  0b T ~ V  x d r h ~ y ~  teheioq. . . 
sorry for the lack of greek sans-serif quotation 
fonts, it's one of the things which have to  be done. 
' 0 6 x 0  
'Ox 
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'33% - i , 6 2  
'34x b 
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'35x k Z t 6 8 d 6  
'Ox 
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8 
Silvio Levy: Using Greek Fonts with 'l&X: 
TUGboat, 9 (1988) 20-24. 
Klaus Thull and Yannis Haralambous: Type- 
setting Modern Greek with 128 Character 
Codes, TUGboat, 10 (1989) 354-358. 
Marcus N. Tod (ed), A Selection of Greek His- 
torical Inscriptions, Oxford 1948. 
Xpfjatog Koihrag, 'OFqybq XpJiasq zoi, MS-DOS 
v. 3.3, 'A0.ijva 1988. 
Donald E. Knuth, The m b o o k  (9th printing), 
Reading 1989. 
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On TeX and Greek…

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