Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the right place to post my
question, but here goes.
I'm a student in classical Greek and I've been
wondering about the possibility for building polytonic
greek support to OpenOffice.org. I have very
rudimentary programming skills mainly with C++, but
I'm eager and ready to learn more and to contribute my
meagre effort to OpenOffice.org.
The problem is that alphabets in classical greek can
include multiple diacritical marks. Most of what is
needed can be accessed already through the Unicode
Extended Greek subset (for instance Unicode 1F84
depicts the greek letter alfa with a spiritus lenis, a
grave accent and an iota subscriptum). In an optimal
situation, e.g. some papyrological diacritics like
underdots should be implemented as well, also readily
available through Unicode. There is however no way -
except through the 'Special Characters' menu - to add
these letters to documents in OpenOffice.
Is there a way to create 'shortcuts' to the classical
greek characters, similar to the way one can
accentuate "á" by pressing the acute accent "'" and
"a" (with the exeption that the classical greek
characters could include _multiple_ diacritical marks
with one alphabet)? Back when I was still using
Windows and agonising with MS Word, there was a
reasonably good program that could do precisely this.
How would one go about to implement this in OOo and
how is the normal accentuation carried out now? Could
polytonic accentuation be achieved by programming a
UNO package or should some other way be considered
better? Does anyone have any experience on working
with Unicode and UNOs or can you point me to a useful
resource or downright programming _examples_ on how to
begin with working with this?
If this implementation would be succesfull (and
reasonably easy to install and use), it would be a
great relief to all students scholars in classical
philology and could _really_ make OOo stand out from
other wordprocessors in this respect! As I've
understood it, there really are currently no real
standard ways to produce and type polytonic Greek in
different wordprocessors. Many won't even encode the
results in Unicode extended Greek, but use their own,
universally incompatiable ways to achieve polytonics,
creating _lots_ of troubles.
BTW, I was adviced to contact the Greek localization
project concerning their possible interests on this
issue, but never got a reply from them.
I hope my post made sense and would be most grateful
for any comments or replies!
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