On 30/06/2004 17:49, John Cowan wrote:
Peter Kirk scripsit:
Since the characters are in fact exactly equivalent, you can use whichever you wish, as long as you are aware that some processes may change one to the other. They should be rendered identically.
True. But the original question was "Which are preferred", and there
is a definite answer to that.
The original question was actually
What is the recommended usage for Classical Greek (and why is it better)?
There seems to be an answer to the first question, in the Unicode FAQ. I have attempted to answer the second, but found that in fact it is not better, at least not consistently so. It should not make any difference, but in practice it does.
But, in favour of using the versions from the Extended Greek sets,
there are a number of fonts around which render the versions in the
main Greek and Coptic block (or has it been officially renamed just
"Greek"?) with a vertical tonos,
Quite so. In general, though, we should encode text correctly ...
All three encodings (decomposed, basic Greek block, Extended Greek block) are correct, and canonically equivalent. So, as far as I can tell, the only good reasons for preferring one to any others are practical ones such as the availability of correct fonts, rendering engines etc. For Busmanus these considerations imply that precomposed characters are definitely preferable, and using the Extended Greek block may be.
... and then use correct fonts, rather than adjusting our encoding to the vagaries of erroneous or obsolete fonts. Unicode 2.0 fonts also have the problem that they produce the wrong forms for theta and phi in running text.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
