[XeTeX] Transliteration mapping for Greek ?

[Nikos Platis]

O/H Apostolos Syropoulos έγραψε:
>>> BTW, your solution will make it
>>> impossible to enter non-Greek text, unless one implements all these stupid
>>> \textlatin, \textgreek commands. 
>>>       
>> How can markup be stupid? How would you otherwise switch between
>> hyphenation patterns, font features, typographic conventions, etc?
>>     
>  
> Markup is not stupid but on the other hand \textlatin and \textgreek
> had been invented to cope with the limitations imposed by TeX, which
> in turn was imposed by the character sets available at the time. (In older
> times it was not even possible to write with lowercase letters!)
> With fonts that can have at most 256 glyphs one cannot create 
> Greek and, say, German texts with a single font. In other words,
> \textgreek was used not to change fonts because one wanted a
> different font for Greek but it was the only way to get Greek text
> in his documents. In conlusion, \textgreek and \textlatin should
> not be viewed as markup.
>
>   
Even in a perfectly Unicode world, in a multilingual text you still need 
to mark the language of the text in order to "switch" many more things 
than just glyphs, as Francois points out. In the case of a greek-latin 
mixed text, it can be considered fortunate that the two sets of glyphs 
are disjoint, so one can discern the two languages based on the 
characters of the words; but consider a mixed english-german text where 
the glyphs are common but everything else (hyphenation, quotes, etc.) is 
different.

That said, it would be nice to have a system that could process 
automatically (without language markup) a multilingual text where the 
languages use different glyphs -- but such a system does not currently 
exist.

-- 
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Nikos Platis
Lecturer                                    http://www.uop.gr/~nplatis/
University of Peloponnese                        email:  nplatis at uop.gr
Department of Computer Science and Technology      tel: +30 2710 372264
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