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From: dcarson@cisunx.UUCP (David  Carson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: I need help with non-Roman fonts
Message-ID: <17536@cisunx.UUCP>
Date: 14 Apr 89 17:18:43 GMT
References: <12413@reed.UUCP>
Reply-To: dcarson@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (David  Carson)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys
Lines: 35


    In article <12413@reed.UUCP> jjake@reed.UUCP (Jacob Sisk) writes:
    >I have a question which I will throw up to any one who can answer it.
    
    >Among other things, I study Ancient Greek, and have access to a number
    >of machine readable texts. I would very much like to be able to
    >incorporate greek text into, say, a paper without too much trouble. 

    >I have tried using Troff and inquired about TeX, but nobody seems to
    >know an easy fix to switch from Roman to Greek fonts. The problem
    >is further complicated by a system of diacritic marks (invented by
    >2nd century monks to retain the accent and sound of Classical Greek),
    >and these are a real sticking point, or so says my math prof who
    >uses TeX quite extensively. 

One fix is to use Silvio Levy's Greek font for TeX.  It can be found in
the Unix distribution of TeX under the "babel" directory.  It includes
all the diacritical marks, as well as defining a Greek environment which 
takes care of some of the dirty work very nicely.  This environment
allows you to type a single accent character before an appropriate
vowel, for example, rather than having to type the backslash character
as well.  It also allows you to always type an `s' regardless of where
you are in the word, and the appropriate sigma will be used.   There
are other niceties as well.

You can switch back and forth between English and Greek with no problem.
The only problem you may encounter is that the fonts are 256-character
fonts, and some device drivers do not properly handle them.  This has been
changing, however, since the first 256-char fonts came out.  The newer
drivers should handle the fonts.  I have used them and they work great!
Thanks to Silvio Levy.

David Carson
Internet: dcarson@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu
BITNet:   dcarson@PITTVMS