[XeTeX] Greek XeLaTeX

Alexandros Gotsis gotsis at science.tuc.gr
Tue Oct 12 08:21:47 CEST 2010


Dear friends,

I am trying to "greekify" XeLaTex in order to make it easier for greek writers to use. I have translated almost all the commands (e.g., instead of \begin{document} I can use \αρχή{κειμένου}, etc.) that I could think of and made new article, book etc. classes with the greek commands. These new classes just renew the commands etc. and they work rather well. There are a few errors still that I try to figure out, but there are also a couple of things that I do not know how to do and, therefore, ask your advise/help.

1. I could replace almost all commands of (Xe)LaTeX, but I can do nothing with the very first one: \documentclass{}! Is there a way to change the name of this command so that the XeLaTeX engine still understands it? I am looking for solutions that will not include any extra (latin) text in the source file, as this would defy the purpose.

2. While I have changed the names for "Chapter", "Figure", the dates, the numbers, capitalisation etc. (thanks for all this go to the work of Syropoylos in Xanthi), I do not know how to change things as, e.g., [c] (center) to [κ] (κέντρο), the length units (from mm το χ etc.). For the time being I would not change anything in the math environments.

3. I do not know how to change the alphabetical order in "makeindex". Usually the accented vowels follow the corresponding unaccented ones in a greek index,. This is not the case for "makeindex", as it follows the unicode listing. which is defined differently, and the result looks wrong in a greek index list (ευρετήριο).

The idea behind the changes is that a writer of greek text (or arab, chinese etc.) should not be obliged to change his/her computer keyboard to latin for the commands and back again for the text. Also the names of the commands would be more transparent for non-english speakers.

Every help on this would be appreciated. I can send you the tentative cls, sty, etc. files that I have generated, if you are interested to try (but I am afraid they will be all greek to you, literally).

Thanks

Alexandros D. Gotsjs
Assoc.Prof., Technical University of Crete
tel +30-2821037259
http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~gotsis/




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