Re: Greek in Groff

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Mortadelas,

I am not an expert in Greek but I have to ask whether you seek support
for modern Greek only or whether you also consider Classical Greek which
uses more diacritics (5 in case of polytonic orthography) than Modern
Greek (two diacritics, if I am not mistaken).

There may be differences between various Greek fonts covering more or
less complete combinations of diacritics with their base letters.

Another issue is encoding. So far, groff is not truly
Unicode-transparent but translates a variety of Unicode characters into
named character entitites (thus bypassing actual code position assignments).

The encoding of choice would probably be ISO 8859-7 in order to remain
within the 8 bit character encoding space.

Finally, if you want to typeset _beautiful_ Greek, hyphenation patterns
must also be loaded but this should ne be too big of a problem as there
are hyphenation patterns available which can be converted to
groff-usable formats.

So far, I see the following order of steps:

1. Install a suitable Greek font

2. Localize necessary strings (like "abstract", "contents", days of the
week etc.)

3. Install suitable hyphenation patterns

4. Write your documents in ISO 8859-7 or convert them from Unicode to
ISO 8859-7

5. Enjoy beautiful groff output.

Best regards,

Oliver.


On 17/03/2023 15:37, Mortadelas Mpiftekas wrote:
> Hello. I recently got fascinated with Groff, thanks to Luke Smith
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8EKH_fjmXA>. There is an issue however.
> How can I write Greek documents in Groff? I made a post in the groff
> subreddit, but unfortunately, the kind people over there could not help me.
> Perhaps you could help me. Thank you a lot for your time. Have a great day!
>
> P.S: This
> <https://www.reddit.com/r/groff/comments/112tfqv/support_for_greek_in_groff/>
> is the post I am referring to.