Re: help on writing Greek characters

elagabalus <PERGLI@xxxxxxxx> scripsit:

As I don't succeed in pasting valid Greek characters in the posts I
send to this
newsgroup, I decided to utilize the Polytonic Greek keyboard.

As a rule of thumb, international Usenet groups use US-ASCII characters only, since other characters don't work reliably enough. Polytonic Greek characters are a particularly difficult case. Even if you sent them correctly, not all newsreaders get and show them properly, and it easily happens that when someone quotes you, things get all wrong.

There's a particular feature in encoding of polytonic Greek that might explain some of the problems that have occurred, and I mention it because it will always remain a problem (though hopefully a manageable one in the future). A Greek letter with a diacritic mark can be represented either as a single Unicode character or as two Unicode characters, namely the base letter followed by a combining diacritic mark. Though they are by definition "compatibility equivalent", they are not identical, and it may well happen that one method works and the other does not, in particular situation. Most probably it's the single-character representation that works more often (and has much better odds of creating a typographically acceptable visual result).

This group is admittedly one of the few international groups where a richer character repertoire would really be needed. But I'm afraid it's still far from safe to use Unicode here (which would be the only sensible way to include polytonic Greek using the real Greek characters).

Thus, try to live with the US-ASCII limitation for the time being. Use some transliteration or, if you have long piece of text that you wish to discuss, write it as a web page and tell its URL.

I tried with Arial Unicode MS and Times New Roman fonts.

It is irrelevant what fonts you used. Font information is not included into a Usenet message (unless you use HTML format on Usenet - you shouldn't), only the characters as elements of a character code. On a web page, it's different, but you need not (and perhaps should not) set the font there either.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

.

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