[texhax] greek symbols and accents

[Uwe Lück]

At 16:30 25.09.05, Reppel, C. wrote:
>How do you put accents (' and ~) on greek letters? Is this only possible with
>\usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
>\textgreek{XXX} where XXX is the text you want in Greek and accents are 
>placed in front of the vocals?

Look at (at least) CTAN:fonts/greek/ -- I had to do this recently.
There is a number of approaches. As far as I can see, there are
two basic different approaches: (1) preceding characters with
accent symbols -- Silvio Levy's approach, taken over by others;
(2) indicating diacritical marks _after_ the character -- ibycus
by Pierre MacKay. Both approaches are possible with babel
as well as without. They also differ in encoding theta etc.

For critical editions, there is a problem with footnotes to be
observed, at least when Greek text is commented non-Greekly.
The older approach is to set accent "characters" \active in
order to use them as accent commands; more recent is
considering vowel/accent combinations ligatures -- the latter
avoids the footnotes problem.

greektex by Y. Moschovakis is made especially for mixing
Greek with non-Greek -- without babel.

Lucky TeXing -- Uwe.