On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 21:49 +0000, Ludvik Engelbrekt Nikulainen wrote: > Hi, > > I'm not sure if this is the right place to post my > question, but here goes. >
users might have been a better choice but ... > 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. > You can set your keyboard up to do this. See http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/various_topics/Howto_special_char.pdf which probably answers the next question too. > Is there a way to create 'shortcuts' to the classical > greek characters, similar to the way one can > accentuate "รก" 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! Andrew Brown is right, Thessalonica is probably what you could use. One known good link is on http://documentation.openoffice.org/thirdparty.html in case his does not. -- PLEASE KEEP MESSAGES ON THE LIST. OpenOffice.org Documentation Co-Lead http://documentation.openoffice.org/
