RE: a simple question about characters with macrons

Any of the values, representations, and encodings you are considering will
work on IE4 and above on all Windows systems (provided the optional Greek
support is installed). Outlook Express 4 and above and Outlook 98 or higher
also support these fine. I am not sure about the level of support with IE
for Mac and Unix.

As far as ancient Greek support, Windows2000 now supports polytonic Greek,
as does IE5 and the latest versions of Outlook Express/Outlook.

Chris Pratley
Group Program Manager
Microsoft Word

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Mueller [mailto:martinmueller@nwu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2000 5:41 PM
To: Misha Wolf; www-international@w3.org
Subject: 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 Monday, 28 February 2000 17:47:28 UTC