[sword-devel] Bug: Greek Text Errors

Birger Langkjer sword-devel@crosswire.org
Wed, 22 Dec 1999 08:53:59 +0100


Den ons, 22 dec 1999 skrev du:
> Upon examining the text in the modules wh, whnu, byz, lxx, & umgreek I
> found that all of them contain errors for the assigned fonts they were
> using. wh, whnu, & byz using the Symbol font have the wrong sigma at the
> ends of words, and chi & xi are swapped. lxx uses the Symbol font and
> has the wrong sigma at the ends of words. umgreek, which uses a separate
> font has too many erros to list. I looked through multiple fonts, but I
> couldn't find any that would produce the correct spelling. If there is a
> font available that works for these texts I certainly can't find it...
> if there is, please let me know. If there isn't, I have processed all of
> the above greek texts to produce the correct spelling using the standard
> Symbol font. I'm new to the development forum and I'm not sure where to
> go from here. I'd be more than happy to upload the corrected modules if
> they can be used by others. Thanks and God bless.

I have a unicode bdf public domain font based on times that you can download
from my webpage: http://members.xoom.com/langkjer/timR12-ucs.bdf.gz
It contains normal and extended (accented) greek plus a lot of centraleurepean
characters (and some hebrew). We could convert the modules to unicode text or
convert timR12-ucs.bdf into a one-byte special SWORD font similar to SIL or
Symbol. The first solution is probably the way to go in the long term, but the
latter might be usefull for backwards compatibility with older systems (if you
don't have the font installed, you will simply see normal latin characters, that
means: with font=greek, without font=latin transscribed).

When I first used Symbolfont to input greek unaccented characters, I didn't
think final sigma was included, but recently I discovered that it _is_ in
there, it's V (capital v). That's very logical, isn't it? :-) I guess it was 
the only unoccupied spot. Symbol was designed for math and not for theologians,
but if final sigma is there and you don't need accents, perhaps it is adequate
after all? What do you think?

-- 
Med venlig hilsen/Best regards
Birger Langkjer
http://members.xoom.com/langkjer