suzmccarth <suzmccarth at yahoo dot com> wrote:

>>> However, how are decomposed or 'combining' diacritcs supposed to
>>> work and do they? Sometimes I go to some other site with
>>> classical Greek and it is still a jumble of empty boxes.
>>
>> Seeing empty boxes does not mean the character encoding model
>> doesn't work. It means your copy of Tahoma (or whatever font the Web
>> site's style sheet uses) doesn't have glyphs for all of the combining
>> characters used in polytonic Greek.
>
> Sorry, Doug, I mean to say I have figured out how to post and
> display precomposed but not decomposed ... yet. I am working on it.

With the help of SC UniPad, which provides conversion between
precomposed and decomposed forms with a single click, I've created a Web
page showing the same passage of polytonic Greek text in both forms.
Try it out and see how it looks in your browser:

http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/alcestis.html

If you like, you can download the page and try adding fonts, or changing
their order, in the "font-family" specification (lines 13 and 14), to
see the text looks in different fonts. Note that if you display the
text in Lucida Sans Unicode, you will get empty boxes in both halves of
the page, but not in the same places. That is, some characters can be
displayed properly in Lucida Sans Unicode in precomposed form but not
with combining characters, while other characters are the opposite.
That's just a quirk of the font.

(In case anyone wonders, I don't remember which Web site I got this
particular text sample from, and I don't know what it is or who wrote
it.)

If you can (and will) read Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft offers a
paper on how polytonic Greek is supported in Windows XP:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/perspectives/polytonic.mspx

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/