--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Doug Ewell" <dewell@...> wrote:

> 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

First, thanks, I appreciate this. It is a good test.

You posted from Euripides' Alcestis, not my favourite but here it is
in English.

"Admetus, you see the things I suffer; and now before I die I mean
to tell you what I wish.

To show you honour and-at the cost of my life-that you may still
behold the light, I die; and yet I might have lived and wedded any
in Thessaly I chose, and dwelt with happiness in a royal home. But,
torn from you, I would not live with fatherless children, nor have I
hoarded up those gifts of youth in which I found delight... you must
rear our children motherless!" and so on.

http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/alcestis.html
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa091900a.htm

This is how it looks to me.

First, in IE, both are full of empty boxes, although I have
configured my browser to display Tahoma and it is fully installed -
I have used it.

Next, in Firefox, both precomposed and decomposed display fully but
the vowels are of uneven size - it does not look natural at all.
When I cut and paste into Word it looks fine in both cases but not
in the browser. The precomposed has accents in the right place but
still the vowels are of two different sizes. For decomposed the
perspomeni, which looks identical to a tilde but isn't, is off
center trailing on to the next letter. So it doesn't look to great.

Here are three posts to my blog where I have been testing out
different fonts and display. As I explain, I could only see the
correct display when I defined my font. Then I got an even text with
precomposed Greek and a defined font. And Sophocles BTW. :)

http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/09/polytonic-greek.html
http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/09/polytonic-greek-fonts.html
http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/09/father-and-son.html


So my sense is that when I go to another webpage in IE I won't see
it correctly, precomposed or decomposed, unless they have defined
their font. And if I visit the webpage in Firefox, it all looks ugly
but is readable no matter what.

Tonight I have posted this test. If you click on the images to
enlarge them, that is what I saw in Firefox. (I didn't want to show
you IE because it was full of boxes.)

http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/10/combining-diacritics.html

Below I posted both the precomposed and decomposed with defined font
Tahoma and they both look good. So my conlusion is that no matter
what the browser, or which encoding, it is essential that the font
be defined. Does that make sense?

Thanks for the text in both encodings, it was a good test.

Suzanne

>
> 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/
>