Full information about the Unicode codes for Greek text?

Greek Learning Greek
1

Because it has multiple accent marks that version is called “polytonic Greek.”

2

Hi Anthony,

But for numbers and music, the entire range of Greek characters/glyphs can be found in these two charts:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf

See also:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/greek.html
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/greek_extended.html
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/combining_diacritical_marks.html

Cordially,

Paul

3

What about vowels that have a macron and an accent mark? Pharr uses these (maybe just for clarity’s sake) and it would occasionally be nice to do that to be consistent with him. I couldn’t find any of them in those charts. Is there any way to make those characters?
Thanks,
Ed

4

Hi Ed,

There are presently no pre-combined macron + accent characters defined in Unicode.

It is possible to create such glyphs using so-called “combining characters”, e.g., the sequence &8048;&772; creates lowercase alpha with macron and acute accent. However, the appearance of such combining characters (see below) is in my experience highly dependent on the rendering client (e.g., the browser) and on the font face.

ὰ̄

Cordially,

Paul

5

A very basic question concerning these charts.
What do the numbers refer to?
I think it probably is a name for a certain keystroke. If so, is there a pattern to the numbers and the keystrokes.

Doesn’t one unicode font have different strokes for letters than another font?

6

Each character in the unicode standard — 10s of 1000s of them — gets a unique number, called a code point in Unicodese.

Doesn’t one unicode font have different strokes for letters than another font?

Yes, but it’s important to distinguish the encoding from the font. U+0391 is GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA always and everywhere. Different fonts can decide to represent that encoding as they see fit.

7

The number IS the character. Be sure to mark the distinction between a character and a glyph. Think of it in terms of Philosophy 101: the character (a number) represents ultimate reality (something noumenal), a glyph is merely the appearance (something phenomenal) of a character. Hence, as Will rightly notes, a single character can have many different appearances.

Cordially,

Paul