unicode, when do we shift to it?

Here you can discuss all things Ancient Greek. Use this board to ask questions about grammar, discuss learning strategies, get help with a difficult passage of Greek, and more.
Post Reply
chad
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 757
Joined: Tue Jul 22, 2003 2:55 am

unicode, when do we shift to it?

Post by chad »

how many people here still get boxes coming up when they see greek in unicode?

if no-one, jeff, could we please have some sort of online unicode converter here in the textkit forum like this

http://jiffycomp.com/smr/unicode-converter/

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

ἀλλ’ εὖ γ?άφεται;
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

Hmm.

I have to tell my browser to use the UTF8 encoding for everything for it to work. And that leads to question marks floating around text (not messages, though) elsewhereon the page.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

chad
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 757
Joined: Tue Jul 22, 2003 2:55 am

Post by chad »

cool, not unicode yet then. just thought i'd see.

Clemens
Textkit Member
Posts: 173
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2003 11:59 am
Location: Salzburg (Austria)

Post by Clemens »

How did you enter this text, annis?

Can anyone read that?

τὸ δοκεῖν καὶ τὰν ἀλάθειαν βιάται.

psilord
Textkit Member
Posts: 184
Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2004 9:38 pm
Location: Madison, WI

Post by psilord »

Annis' text is unreadable to me.

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

πῶς δὲ τόδε· τίς δὲ βιός, τί δὲ τέ?πνον, ἀτὲ? τοῦ UNICODE?

Edit: How vexing.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

psilord
Textkit Member
Posts: 184
Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2004 9:38 pm
Location: Madison, WI

Post by psilord »

annis wrote:πῶς δὲ τόδε· τίς δὲ βιός, τί δὲ τέ?πνον, ἀτὲ? τοῦ UNICODE?
Yup, still totally unreadable, I get a bunch of 1/2 fractions and a lot of german-like vowels, upside down question marks, etc. What unicode font are you trying to use? Maybe I don't have it installed. Since I know you use a mac, chances are the mac has a passable unicode font installed for the entire range of unicode. I'm not that lucky...

psilord
Textkit Member
Posts: 184
Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2004 9:38 pm
Location: Madison, WI

Post by psilord »

Does this unicode work:

μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεα, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

Huh, it pasted correctly into the post edit window... Let's see...

It even ended up in the preview stage correctly.

edit: though after the preview, I got the raw unicode numbers in the edit box itself....
Last edited by psilord on Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

psilord
Textkit Member
Posts: 184
Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2004 9:38 pm
Location: Madison, WI

Post by psilord »

Clemens, I can read yours just fine.

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

I can see both clemens' and psilord's tests. My own turn to gibberish, which I really don't understand. I'm using the same browser, with the same settings, I use to post unicode Greek on blogs where it all works just dandy.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

GlottalGreekGeek
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 903
Joined: Sun Dec 12, 2004 3:37 am
Location: Mountain View

Post by GlottalGreekGeek »

I can read everybody's unicode except Annis'.

Timotheus
Textkit Member
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2005 7:25 am
Location: Yelm, WA ; USA

Post by Timotheus »

only partial Psilord Annis' is just gibberish.

Democritus
Textkit Fan
Posts: 331
Joined: Fri May 07, 2004 12:14 am
Location: California

Post by Democritus »

Annis' posts contained raw unicode characters, but psilord's and Clemens' posts contain HTML-escaped entities, like so:
μῆνιν ἄειδε,
It might be helpful to describe the exact steps to make the postings. What editor was used to create the unicode, what browser was used to post it, etc.

I pasted this from MS Word into Firefox:

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

I think textkit did the HTML entity escaping, but the details of what Firefox posted probably had something to do with that. Annis, what browser are you using to post?

With Firefox I can see psilord's and Clemens' texts with no trouble, but on IE the accented characters appear as boxes.

I'll bet this board's charset is configurable globally. I wonder what things would look like if it were changed from iso-8859-1 to UTF8.

Clemens
Textkit Member
Posts: 173
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2003 11:59 am
Location: Salzburg (Austria)

Post by Clemens »

I used Keyman (http://www.tavultesoft.com) and entered the text directly into the reply box of the forum. I use Opera, but it should also work with Firefox and IE.

(Opera and Firefox display unicode characters automatically if you have a unicode font installed but the IE needs a little configuration.)

I can't read annis' text either.

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Hi All,

I just got back from a college reunion and am a bit wasted. I will try to revisit this thread in the next day or two.

For now, please note that some of these problems are font-related. Specifically, unless you tell your browser to ignore the fonts defined on the textkit web page, these fonts will govern. But I don't see any Unicode fonts among them.

It would be best if founder Jeff could add a few common Unicode fonts to the CSS selectors.

The problem with Will's Unicode data is trickier, but obviously related to the page encoding. The textkit pages use the iso-8859-1 (Latin 1) encoding. Will's "raw" Unicode cannot be interpreted under this encoding. But the "entity-ized" data created by others (e.g., μ ...) can be.

At least that's how it looks to me so far.

Oh yeah, Will's 3rd post actually contains some invalid Unicode data in a few places. These will never display correctly.

Cordially,

Paul

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

πεῖ?ά τις.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

User avatar
Jeff Tirey
Administrator
Posts: 896
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2002 6:58 pm
Location: Strongsville, Ohio

Post by Jeff Tirey »

i can read everyones Greek text fine with Firefox but not with IE. I doubt I have my IE browser configed right for unicode.
Textkit Founder

Geoff
Textkit Fan
Posts: 345
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 2:30 pm

Post by Geoff »

When using IE

Step 1 - Open the File Menu and stare at it for 5 minutes.
Step 2- Restart
Step 3 - Open IE and pull down the View Menu and go through all the options under encoding to make sure unicode is enabled.
Step 4 - Restart
Step 5 - Call Microsoft and stay on the phone for 2 hours to get the redirect to the automated service center which will tell you to press F1 or Restart.
Step 6 - Waive a Dead Chicken over your Computer
Step 7 - Restart
Step 8 - Use SPIONIC

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

Geoff, I already told him about the dead chicken.

When Jeff set the HTML encoding to utf-8, the Unicode Greek works, but a bunch of other text on the front pages goes wonky.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

The following changes need to be made to Textkit forum pages:

1. Initial META tag should assert utf-8 character set, e.g., <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

2. CSS class selector .postbody should include one or more common Unicode fonts under font-family, e.g. arial unicode ms.

3. CSS class selector .quote should include one or more common Unicode fonts under font-family, e.g. arial unicode ms.

Jeff, why don't you give these settings a try? NB: something analogous will have to be done for the 'Topic Review' section when you post a reply.

If you've tried this and, as Will reports, other text has gone wonky, can you send me the page(s) with wonky text?

-pb

User avatar
Jeff Tirey
Administrator
Posts: 896
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2002 6:58 pm
Location: Strongsville, Ohio

Post by Jeff Tirey »

hi everyone,

I tried Paul's suggestions with updating the style sheet -- I hope i did it correct. I have now:

.quote {
font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS','Doulos SIL', 'Gentium',Arial,Helvetica,serif;
font-size: 11px; color: #444444; line-height: 125%;
background-color: #FAFAFA; border: #D1D7DC; border-style: solid;
border-left-width: 1px; border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px
}



and

.postbody {
font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS','Doulos SIL', 'Gentium' ,Arial,Helvetica,serif;
font-size : 12px;
}


How is it working now for everyone?
Textkit Founder

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Hi Jeff,

The META tag utf-8 looks OK. But I don't see any evidence of a font-family tag in the .postbody selector (same in .quote). When I 'view source' I see:

.postbody { font-size : 12px; line-height: 18px;}

Consequently, I still see 'box' characters in the Greek. Please note that if I save the source to my PC; edit it to provide the missing font-family (providing a Unicode font); and open the file in IE, it works fine.

Where did you make the changes? Please let me know if I can be of help.

Cordially,

Paul

User avatar
Jeff Tirey
Administrator
Posts: 896
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2002 6:58 pm
Location: Strongsville, Ohio

Post by Jeff Tirey »

Hi Paul,

I'm still figuring out this phpbb template. Looks like the style sheet is hardcoded into the header template.

Try now..

For me, this looks good in FireFox, but in IE I see all blocks.
Textkit Founder

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Yes! Much better now.

I can see proper greek glyphs in all posts in this thread (using IE or Firefox)

What do you see with IE?

-Paul

User avatar
Jeff Tirey
Administrator
Posts: 896
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2002 6:58 pm
Location: Strongsville, Ohio

Post by Jeff Tirey »

I see these blocks, but I'll admit this.. I didn't try that hard to config the IE settings.

I'm also concerned with some strange happenings elsewhere. Do you see those question marks '???' here and there. Also, I have to figure out why our old friend SPIonic is not displaying.
Last edited by Jeff Tirey on Wed Dec 07, 2005 3:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
Textkit Founder

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Hi again Jeff,

I think you should modify both .postbody and .quote to include these fonts, e.g.:

.postbody
{
font-family: arial unicode ms, gentium, palatino linotype, georgia greek, cardo, galilee unicode gk, vusillus old face italic,
Doulos SIL, Arial, Helvetica, serif;


}

Do the same for .quote selector. Note that you don't need quotes around these font names.

The next thing we need to fix are the question marks that are shot through the page. These are caused by non-breaking spaces (entityized as &nbsp;). Do you have any control over the use of this entity? E.g., could you replace them with the HTML BReak tag?

Cordially,

Paul

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

jeff wrote:I'm more concerned with some strange happenings elsewhere. Do you see those question markes '??' here and there.
See my previous post.
jeff wrote:Also, I have to figure out why our old friend SPIonic is not displaying.
I trust you are here referring to the appearance of unconverted [face=spionic] tags? If so, this must somehow relate to the HTML generator in phpBB.

Cordially,

Paul

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Hi jeff,

The CSS selector textarea.post also needs the same font treatment. This selector governs the appearance of text in the 'reply box' textarea.

Cordially,

Paul

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Post by annis »

ο?κοῦν γ?άφειν ὀ?θῶς δύναμαι;
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

Paul
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 4:47 pm
Location: Maryland
Contact:

Post by Paul »

Exactly. Not until Jeff updates the css selector for the reply box as per my previous post.

Cordially,

Paul

Post Reply