On Aug 12, 2008, at 9:46 AM, Jörg Hagmann wrote:
A postscript to greek issues:
Thanks for the report.
As I wrote, everything works fine now---with Mark II, which is what I still use.
When I try "context mygreekfile.tex", without any font specification, the following characters are missing: lower case: c (end of word sigma), m (mu), and s (sigma) upper case: same
If I specify font=Ibycus, it works fine If I specify font=Teubner, I get no greek, just roman characters (but the same tex file works when compiled with "texexec") If I specify font=GreekGentium, I get no output (Invalid glyph index (git 1714) ==> Fatal error etc. Again, this works with "texexec".
I'm using recent minimals (Contextgarden) on Mac OS X Leopard and ubuntu.
If it's got something to do with my not knowing how to deal with fonts in Mark IV (which is the case), just ignore this message. But if the reasons are deeper, it might be of interest to you.
No, that's a combination of my lack of enthusiasm for writing new documentation and your not reading the documentation which is provided (greekmodule.pdf, p. 3) :-) In a nutshell: when mkiv was new, I experimented around with support for Babel-like transliteration in mkiv, but it turned out to be very cumbersome and time-consuming because it has to be implemented for every font, one by one. I'm unlikely to go to this length because this ASCII input was just a stopgap when TeX was unable to digest 16-bit input. I've done it for a few fonts (such as GreekGentiumAlt), for my private amusement, but it just isn't worth the effort. The novelty of luatex lies just here: it processes utf8 by default, that's why I recommend using utf8 when writing Greek in mkiv; it works well in mkii, and there's no reason not to use it. The only thing that may be troublesome is when you have lots of old files. I have a converter written in python here which works reasonably well. Hans implemented one in lua (see $TEXMF/scripts/ context/lua/mtx-babel.lua) which is even better, but doesn't appear to work with the current version of mkiv. But I have to look at the default font, this one should work even with Babel. Thomas