[XeTeX] Transliteration mapping for Greek ?

[Benct Philip Jonsson]

Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:

> I did not object to this. But I do believe it is unnecessary to make 
> it more complex for something only very very few people are going 
> to use. Finally, I would insist on this, so as to force people to adopt 
> finally "new" technologies. 

Transliteration and automatic conversion of transliteration
are necessary if one works with dozens of languages in tens
of scripts, as scholars sometimes do.  I do if possible want
to have the native script in my finished document, but I 
can't have ten physical keyboards lying around!  SCIM, XIM 
and custom keyboard layouts are a hassle if you first have 
to make them yourself and then have to have printouts of
different keyboard layouts and key sequences lying around.

I have worked with a keyboard with both Latin and Cyrillic
letters printed on the keys, and I'm quite sure I wouldn't
want a keyboard with all of Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Avestan,
Devanagari, transcription characters for the last two
and IPA on the keys!

It is much easier to use a sensible transliteration into
ASCII or whatever characters you have easily accessible
on your keyboard and then have a program auto-transliterate
them into the real Unicode thing!  OTOH I do my
transliteration with Perl scripts I wrote myself: it is easy
enough for a perl module like Regexp::Common::Balanced to
find my custom markup and convert the relevant strings.
Thus my production XeLaTeX source file is Unicode only, the
custom transliterations being filtered out beforehand,
which I consider a Good Thing. However I still use custom
commands like \greek{} and \sanskritTranscription{}
\sanskritTransliteration{} in case I should want to change
the typographical rendering of all relevant spans in one
fell swoop.

/BP 8^)>
-- 
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)