[texhax] Greek in footnote

[Uwe Lück]

At 09:55 31.08.06, N.J.I. Mars wrote:
>
>I am trying to get a few words in Greek in an English-language document. I 
>use MiKTeX 2.5, 'as is' (no local modifications; I have no idea how to do 
>that).
>
>The minimal example:
>
>\documentclass{book}
>
>\usepackage[greek,english]{babel}
>\languageattribute{greek}{polutoniko}
>
>\begin{document}
>
>The sequence \foreignlanguage{polutonikogreek}{abgdezhjiklmnxoprsctufqyw}
>was created by:\footnote{This does not yet work in footnotes: 
>\foreignlanguage{polutonikogreek}{abgdezhjiklmnxoprsctufqyw}.}
>\verb&\foreignlanguage{polutonikogreek}{abgdezhjiklmnxoprsctufqyw}&
>
>\end{document}
>works fine, except that the footnote comes out in Latin script, rather 
>than (partially) in Greek. What do I do wrong?

In an analoguous situation, I don't use babel, just something like

     \usepackage{ibycus4,german}

-- just \usepackage{ibycus4} for you. Thus you get a one-parameter
macro \textgreek.

However, ibycus represents greek glyphs and diacritical marks
in a very different way than other packages for Greek.

A more "traditional" representation (I think) comes along with
a recent font by Claudio Beccari ...

The problem has been discussed earlier here,
and a similar one applies to lazy implementations of
indexing. I hardly know babel, I am just astonished
it still is unable to handle this problem.
Typically the problem arises when a macro tries to
change \catcode's in some argument -- when \footnote
has read its argument, it is impossible to change
\catcode's of characters inside.

A long time ago (or still now with babel?), Greek was
typeset with TeX by making some characters \active.
Instead, the two approaches I recommended above
use fonts providing lots of ligatures.

I wish you good luck with creating the new fonts
with MiKTeX -- earlier versions needed some wizard
knowledge to do this. You may find in the texhax
archive (last year) how I fighted the obstacles.

Hope this helps,

Uwe Lueck.