Re: help on writing Greek characters

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> scripsit:

For some reason there's no Arial Unicode on this
machine,

You probably mean "Arial Unicode MS" - that's the font name (a trademark). It's no wonder that you haven't got it, since it's distributed only as part of Microsoft Office software. (It used to be available separately for free on the Web, but that was years ago.)

but there is Lucida Sans Unicode

That's normal, since that font is part of several flavors of Windows (practically speaking all Windows versions that are still in use, I guess).

-- but apparently not a
complete set.

No single font contains all Unicode characters. "Unicode fonts" are fonts that use Unicode coding (Unicode code numbers for characters), and they should not be expected to cover all of the about 100,000 characters in Unicode. Besides, there are fonts under the same name but with different character repertoires - different versions of "the same font".

Thus, even if we assume that all software is Unicode-capable (which surely isn't true), we cannot just use characters and expect everyone to see them.

As demonstrated in this thread, there are rather nasty problems in Google Groups, independently of any font issues. Andreas Prilop posted a simple test, containing simple Greek letters as used in modern Greek, using the ISO-8859-7 encoding. Yet if you view it via Google Groups, you will see a mixture of ISO Latin 1 characters. When people send followups using Google Groups, further confusion arises. I'm not particularly worried about people who use Google Groups as their regular newsreader (that's a poor choice and has its negative implications anyway), but I'm worried about Google Groups as an archive that people use - for good reasons. When our messages have expired from most news servers, typically in a few weeks, they will continue their life indefinitely on Google Groups. This means that non-ASCII characters will often appear as transmogrified into something else.

Thus, there are strong reasons to stick to US-ASCII on Usenet. If you intend to use anything else, consider the implications. Sometimes it might be feasible to use both a transliteration and the original spelling (e.g., with the latter in parentheses after the transliteration, for the benefit of those who can see it correctly). We can probably be optimistic about getting the US-ASCII characters kept as they are even if Google Groups messes up all the rest.

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

.

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