This page contains some resources that may help you in inserting Greek letters into English documents or configuring your computer to read Modern Greek and Polytonic Ancient Greek.
Modern Greek has a monotonic or "one accent mark" spelling system, but Ancient Greek is spelled with multiple accent marks or in a "polytonic" accent system. Ancient Greek (or "Polytonic Greek") support is more complex because it contains more accents and characters than modern Greek does.
In terms of the support level needed:
If you only need to insert a few characters, then you can use the Windows Character Map.
See Detailed XP Instructions for instructions with screen capture images.
Additional instructions are available from Elpenor's Greek Polytonic Setup for Windows.
There are several options available depending on your needs.
Student Computing Labs - Both the Greek and Greek Polytonic keyboards are availabe. You can select them through the flag icon on the upper right.
). Use the dropdown menu to select a script or language.See the Macintosh Keyboard Activation for complete instructions with screen captures.
There is no Language Kit or specially encoded font for Greek, but third party software is available. See the Links section below. For print work, you can use Symbol or any number of available Greek fonts available on the Internet.
Avoiding the Symbol Font: Although this used to be a print Greek font available on most machines, there are now several versions in use, with newer Unicode compliant versions and older non-encoded versions. Avoid specifying this font.
All modern browsers support this script. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. In some cases, you will be asked to match a script with a font.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display Greek characters.
Herodotus, The Histories on Perseus (Tufts)
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of Greek, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Greek encoding under the View menu of your browser.
Users must install specialized Unicode fonts in order to read Polytonic Ancient Greek text.
See also
Browsers which fully support Unicode are strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display Greek characters.
Ancient Greek (Unicode) - www.stoa.org/unicode (Scroll down to "Alcestis" passage)
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of Ancient Greek you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
There are special character entities for Greek letters; however, these are so new that they are implemented in only the most recent browsers such as Internet Explorer 5/6, Mozilla, Safari and Opera. They do not work in Netscape 4.7. You can look at
α (lowercase alpha) - α
Α (uppercase alpha) - Α
β(lowercase beta) - β
Β (uppercase beta) - Β
and so forth...
See Ian Graham's Mathematical Symbols for HTML or Web Develepor's Virtual Reference HTML Special Characters and Browser Compatibility for more details and a complete list, including math symbols.
These codes should be used for individual letters or an isolated word - not for extensive passages or all-Greek pages.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.If you are designing a new page, Unicode encoding is recommended since it supports the most characters.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression or other Web editor and change the keyboard to the correct script. This will allow you to type content in directly with the appropriate script. However, it is important to verify that the correct encoding is specified in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign language text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression, and edited for formatting.
For Web tools such as Blogs at Penn State, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flicker, and others, users can typically change the keyboard and input text. In most cases, this content will be encoded as Unicode.
If you wish to input a word or short phrase, you can use Unicode entity codes. See the Unicode Greek Block Codes page for details.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
