Fonts

[Socrates the Cyborg]

Sorry to ask this question again but I am having trouble with seeing greek properly in IE. Now, I have read the forum back for the last 2 years and have seen that there was some change where people tried to go to SPIonic but somehow that didn't really work out it seems. I can't see SPIonic when there are tags in the post like is covered repeatedly before. I have downloaded SPionic, I have restarted my computer, I have downloaded other fonts designed to allow me to read greek (gentium, cardo, greek keys) . I also am still seeing boxes for some stuff in the forum topic titles, but not really in the actual messages. So my questions are these:
1) Is SPionic functional here or not? If I can't seem to get it to work, is that a problem on my end or not?
2) If SPionic does not work, then WHY is there a sticky at the top of the forum telling me I must use it?
3) Is it just a fact of life here now that because there is no central standard I must resign myself to being able see some posters greek while some other will be gibberish?

Sorry if I'm alittle peevish it's just I've spent hours sifting through the posts trying to do my part to figure out what's going on. Despite this and a plenitude of posts on this it all still seems confused. Thanks in advance for replies.

[Paul]

Hi,

I am sorry for your troubles. The Greek forums no longer support Greek glyphs by means of the SPIonic font; instead they expect Unicode characters.

How do the next two lines appear to you?

μῆνιν ἄειδε
[face=spionic]mh=nin a)/eide[/face]

Barring an unexpected setting in IE, if you have any of the following fonts on your system, you should be able to see only greek glyphs (no boxes) in the first line:

arial unicode ms
gentium
palatino linotype
georgia greek
cardo
galilee unicode gk
vusillus old face italic
Doulos SIL

Cordially,

Paul

[Socrates the Cyborg]

Paul,

I am able to read the first line, the second line has tags before hand and latin characters with =) and / mixed in.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

SPIonic used to be the standard, but changes to the programming of this forum broke the SPIonic, so we switched to Unicode. That sticky must be out of date.

Paul's first line of Greek was in Unicode, so apparently your browser handles polytonic Greek unicode just fine.

[Paul]

I am able to read the first line, the second line has tags before hand and latin characters with =) and / mixed in.

As Ms. G-cubed notes, you're fine. It's simply time to say goodbye to SPIonic.

BTW GlottalGreekGeek: do I hear Arnold-speak in the spelling of your location?

Cordially,

Paul

[edonnelly]

3) Is it just a fact of life here now that because there is no central standard I must resign myself to being able see some posters greek while some other will be gibberish?

It is too bad that a wealth of great information in the archives of this forum will be less accessible to people. Is there no way to easily set up the forum so that it will allow those old (but still useful) posts to be seen in their "original" format?

[Paul]

3) Is it just a fact of life here now that because there is no central standard I must resign myself to being able see some posters greek while some other will be gibberish?

It is too bad that a wealth of great information in the archives of this forum will be less accessible to people. Is there no way to easily set up the forum so that it will allow those old (but still useful) posts to be seen in their "original" format?

I am not sure why SPIonic broke in the first place. Jeff would probably know the answer to this. Perhaps it wouldn't be hard to fix.

-pb

[Socrates the Cyborg]

thanks for the replies... I am alittle surprised about that sticky being up there because as in this case, I have always found people here to be very prompt and accurate with their answers. It was pretty confusing to read and do what was suggested but not get it to work.

Now another question...as far as if I want to type greek, I have the polytonic keyboard for windows XP. Is that sufficient for most other people to see or would there be a better way to make sure most people would be able to read what I wrote?

[GlottalGreekGeek]

Well, you could type something in polytonic Greek, and we can tell you whether we can read it or not.

I know SPIonic/Betacode well enough that I can read the archives *without* the font working ... still, it would be nice if the archives could somehow be patched.

And I did not intend that to be Arnoldspeak, I just was playing around with the name of my home state. But you have just given me a new idea...

[annis]

It is too bad that a wealth of great information in the archives of this forum will be less accessible to people. Is there no way to easily set up the forum so that it will allow those old (but still useful) posts to be seen in their "original" format?

That would probably take a little programming. A previous upgrade of the Forum software did not cope gracefully with all the [font] tags in our posts, and seems to have done some awful rewrite on them. To fix it we'd have to sweep over the database holding our posts matching on the addled font tags and updating them with something better.

[Socrates the Cyborg]

καλη βουλη

[Paul]

καλη βουλη

So far so good!

Try it again with some accents and a breathing or two.

-pb

[Socrates the Cyborg]

ἀᾶὰἒἒ I can get the polytonic keyboard working, the only problems is that all of the symbols with accents or breathings look like boxes to me! I have tried changing both the font and language in IE as well as the encoding under the view menu, but I haven't been doing these in any systematic way, so I don't know if my lack of success is just due to not picking the right combination. The funny thing is there is a bunch of stuff in the forums with breathings and accents that I can read. This problem is quite strange! Can you guys see the characters?

[Socrates the Cyborg]

ἀ ᾶ ὰ ἂ ἆ Stranger yet, when I actually posted that I could see the characters, although it all looks run together to me. Now back here in the input pane again, the characters look like boxes again.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

I have the same problem ... polytonic Unicode looks like goobly-gook when I type it in (unless I use Sophokeys), but looks fine when I preview my post, and when I actually post.

You get used to it.

BTW your polytonic Greek looks fine to me.

[Socrates the Cyborg]

Ok, I think I know about where I am with this stuff now. Thanks for all the help!

[annis]

I have updated the sticky.

[Socrates the Cyborg]

Thanks Annis