a simple question about characters with macrons

This is a  naive and practical question. I am editing a bilingual edition 
of Early Greek epic for the University of Chicago Press. We use 
transliterated Greek in addition to Greek display.  The Greek display uses 
"beta code." For transliterated Greek, we use the characters e and o with a 
circumflex to represent eta and omega. That is unicode 00ea,  00ca 00f4 and 
00de.  Those characters travel over the net   through entity references and 
are rendered accurately on all browsers.

That works well enough, but a more elegant solution would be to use e and o 
with a macron, that is Unicode  0113, 0112, 014d, 014c. These characters 
appear on my Windows NT machine character map (which is the source of all 
my wisdom on the subject) as part of the Latin Extended A keyboard.

I assume there are entity references for those characters. But do these 
characters travel as dependably over the net and are they likely to be 
rendered properly by all versions of Netscape and Microsoft browsers 
version 4 and up?

I'd be grateful for advice. I'd also be grateful for advice on the encoding 
of ancient Greek. Beta code is a kludgy but dependable system of 
representing the orthographic conventions of ancient Greek with its 
Byzantine combinations of accents and breathing marks. It looks to me 
(without much experimentation) that the NT "Greek" locale doesn't have 
provisions for ancient Greek. But I may not have looked hard enough.

Anyhow, if there is an emerging consensus that Unicode has a better way of 
dealing with ancient Greek than Unicode, I'd love to know about.

Thanks in advance.



Martin Mueller
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.  USA
martinmueller@nwu.edu

Received on Sunday, 27 February 2000 20:40:43 UTC