Selection menu for using Greek fonts
Select the appropriate machine/system
type
- MS-DOS Greek for MS-DOS
machines
- Windows 3.11/95 Writing Greek
on Windows 3.11/Windows 95 machines
- MacOS Greek under MacOS
- Amiga Writing Greek using
an Amiga
- X-Windows Writing Greek with
X-Windows
Computing in Greek ?
A severe problem to read and write Greek on the Net is
the combination of special characters needed for writing in Greek and the small size of
Greek market. The problem became more complicated due to the lack of any nation-wide
standard for reading, writing and printing in Greek. Every single company proposed and
followed it's own Greek codeset. Sometimes variant codesets used even by a single computer
company making the development and establishment of a standard a summer's night dream.
This is a paradigm on how development of communication can diversify people instead of
unite them.
Finally, one of all codesets seems to be the most
prominent for the moment. It's known as ISO-8859-7 and has very limited differences from
the ELOT 928 (ELOT is the Greek Standard Organization) the codeset used by Windows 3.11
and Windows 95. It's encouraging that some of the big hardware ventors they provide
internationalized version of their operating systems which include now support for the
Greek language.
Another page with Greek fonts ?
This page's aim is not to be "another one" of
the many already covering the topic. Our page preferes to act as general reference to
resources and instructions, a tool to find and install what it's more fit to your needs
describing in a simple, straightforward manner.
Another purpose is to provide an alternative mirror site
for some of these programs and resources because we know the connectivity problems that
Greece faces with the rest of the world.
Few general introductory comments
The first thing to be comprehended when trying to install
Greek fonts in a system is that reading Greek and writing in Greek are two related but
distinct things (and sending email in Greek a third one).
- Reading Greek
The only things needed to read Greek are the appropriate
fonts and to define properly the encoding (codeset) you are about to use.
- Writing in Greek
You need everything needed to read Greek PLUS :
A way to tell to the computer which key in the keyboard
prints which greek character. Technically speaking this means you need the appropriate
keyboard driver (keyboard layout in mac terminology).
- Greek and World Wide Web
The above mentionned things meet the needs for having
full access into Greek documents through WWW.
- Greek and server/client model applications
We mention here server/client model applications despite
the fact that WWW falls to this category. The great majority of those applications (IRC,
sendmail etc) they can support Greek but the are not configured to do it by default. The
result is a great variety of servers and clients that trasmit and receive Greek properly
or not. Therefore some of the inteded recipients get perfectly your trasmission (e.g. your
mail) but others they receive nothing but garbage.
Since Internet is communicating with others and not
isolating ourselves from the others ( as happenned with the standard for reading Greek )
we suggest to avoid sending pure Greek trasmissions unless you are sure that anyone can
read them. We hope soon Greek will be a standard and all we can use them bypassing
greeklish.
Greek on MS-DOS machines
ELOT 928 font for DOS machines is now available (16KB) thanks to Techlink.
Using Greek on Windows 3.11 /
Windows 95
Arial.exe
(161Kb) is a common ELOT 928 font for Windows (3.1 , 3.11 and 95) found in many Greek
servers. Originally created among other fonts by Pouliadis
Associates Corp. is one of the many fonts
(183 Kb) you can find in HRI's collection
(783 Kb) in USA.
To write in Greek as mentionned above you need a keyboard
driver. Such driver is wingreek.zip (7Kb).
Many thanks to HRI (Hellenic Resources Network) and to Alexandros
Pseirakis who was originally distributed the driver.
Greek support on MacOS
ELOT 928 was a standard for the world of MS-Windows. Mac
users are using Greek fonts and keyboard layouts specially designed for Apple machines
using a different encoding (ELOT 823).
There is available a package (218 Kb)containing :
- Three converted ELOT 928 fonts based on those distributed
by Pouliadis Associates Corp. namely HellasTimes,
HellasFun (proportional fonts) and HellasCourrier (fixed font).
- One ELOT 928 font based on the ELOT823 GrHelvetica named HellasHelvetica.
- A keyboard driver (layout) supporting ELOT928 encoding.
- Instructions to install the package and how to configure
Netscape to read and write Greek ELOT928 text.
The very same fonts can be used to read and send email
written in Greek.
The same package is mirrored in U.S. by HRI.
If you are only interested to use Netscape with Greek
ELOT928 text Andreas Prilop came up with a more elegant solution. A patch
which when applied to Netscape changes the encoding and someone can use native Mac Greek
fonts (ELOT 823) to view ELOT928 texts. This patch is available from any info-mac mirror
site.
ELOT928 characters and Amiga
Thanks to Elias
Papanikolaou a small package containing elot928 fonts and a keyboard driver is available(29Kb).
Here is how he is describing the package: These are some of the Greek fonts I have and use
in my system (I am Greek you see!). In particular, I use helveticagr/11 as screen and icon
font,and couriergr/13 as system font. The fonts in this distribution follow theGreek
ELOT928 standard encoding, and according to it, the Greek characters are mapped to the
upper 128 ASCIIs. The lower 128 characters are the normal Latin characters.
This means that you can use the fonts on your English Workbench without noticing any
difference until... a Greek document or word comes up. Then you will be able to read it
(if you know Greek) whereas without the fontsnothing would make sense. Unfortunately other
European languages (other than English, that is) that use special accent characters (i.e.
German umlauts) won't show correctly because these accents are encoded in the upper 128
characters, where the Greek characters in these fonts reside (of course in some cases i.e.
German, one is able to write without using umlauts).
Other than that, these fonts, along with the included keymap, provide the means to
maintain a Greek/English system.
X - Windows
Dealing with X-windows make things a bit more
complicated. Let's see step by step some basics for the fonts on X - windows system.
When you run an X-client by default it
looks in several places to find the fonts which are goinf to be used. You can see which
are those folders by issuing the command :
xset -q
One of the usual places to install new fonts if you are a
system administrator is the directory
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/
But you can install your new fonts anywhere. To add a
font directory into your font path, you might type:
xset +fp new_fonts_full_path
Download then one of the packets (or all of them)
proposed below and copy it to the desirable destination.
Fonts can come in different formats. Some of them are listed bellow
There are converters to convert BDF fonts
to all other formats:
bdftosnf converts BDF to SNF fonts
bdftopcf converts BDF to PCF fonts
dxfc converts BDF to PCF fonts
(distributed with DECWindows)
Use the releevant converter to end up with
the desirable format with the Greek Fonts you are going to download
One more step is needed : When a client requests a specified font, the server searches in
each of the directories in its font path for a file called fonts.dir . This file maps the
name of the requested font to the filename of the font as it is stored in the filesystem.
If there is no match, the client reverts t its own defaults.
The fonts.dir file is needed because some
operating systems have restrictions on filenames. Its presence is required for the server
to access any fonts within a directory. To create it , simply type
mkfontdir
from within the directory containing the new fonts.In fact, you have to retype the
command every time you add or delete fonts from a directory to keep fonts.dir file in sync
with the actual contents of the font area.
Summarizing X - Windows
- Download the fonts and put them in an appropriate
directory,
- Go into the font's directory and change its
format from BDF to what it is appropriate by using the relevant converter,
- type mkfontdir to create fonts.dir
file,
- type xset +fp
full_path_to_fonts_directory,
- type xset fp rehash to tell the
server that something has changed and to rebuild his internal list.
What's next ?
Your system now, must know about the fonts you installed.
Type xlsfonts to get a full list of the installed fonts. Configure the desired
program to use Greek fonts (e.g. start netscape version 2.0 with the command
netscape -xrm "*documentFonts.charset*iso8859-7:
iso-8859-1"
in order to read Greek.
That's it ?
Not quite... We explained what someone has to do but
where are the Greek fonts ? A lot of different people wrote fonts. We tried to put them
all in one page here
|
