[XeTeX] Transliteration mapping for Greek ?

[Benct Philip Jonsson]

Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
>> 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
> 
> I am a co-author of "Digital Typography Using LaTeX" and
>  there we described tools to typeset text in many 
> different languages using LaTeX. So believe me, I know 
> exactly what this is about.

Sorry.  My experience is with people thinking only in
terms of inputting two different scripts, who go uh-hu
when talking about *multiple* scripts.

> Nevertheless, I did not liked what I had to do.

Understandably.

> It would be far better for me to be able to directly 
> enter multilingual text into our files.

Absolutely.  I hope there will come a keyboard
which is actually a touch screen which can not
only change the labels on the 'keys' according
to the currently selected keyboard layout but
also change the layout of the 'keys' themselves
according to the task at hand. (Speaking as
someone who has both a Dvorak keyboard which I
use and a QWERTY keyboard which my wife uses
attached to the home computer, and recently
bought a 'special World of Warcraft keyboard'
as au urgently requested present for my son! :-)
Not so long ago there was some talk about a
keyboard where each key had a small LCD screen,
but speaking ATM a touchscreen 'keyboard'
seems better!


> Transliteration only confuses things. In the end, one can
> use an editor like yudit which supports  many many
> different input methods. As for Greek, one can enter text
> following the conventions adopted by the CB fonts. But
> the ibycus as well some other conventions are supported.
> 
Indeed, but using an IM or a keyboard layout which
in practice means that I have to memorize a
transliteration in my head -- e.g. I press the
"X" key and a "ж" or an "ξ" shows up on my screen
is at least to me a little confusing too --
though I use it all the time in OOo and sometimes
in vim.  I guess I like the visual feedback
it means to see the same thing on my screen
and on my keyboard.  An added exigency is that I
constantly forget which virtual keyboard/IM I
have active ATM, and to switch between them.
That's where actually seeing on the keyboard what
I get on the screen, and actually seeing in the form of
markup what a given string is going to/supposed to
represent is helpful.

BTW, are you familiar with the "proliferation vs.
transliteration" debate among philologists?

> As suggested already, if people do want transliterations,
> then can create little packagesthat implement them.

Yes as I said that's what I do, though I do it with
Perl scripts which also can be used as filters in vim.
The reason I use XeLaTeX is that at *some* point in
my editing process I do want to have everything in
Unicode.

Regards,

/BP


> Regards, A.S.
> 
> ---------------------- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, 
> Greece http://obelix.ee.duth.gr/~apostolo 
> http://asyropoulos.wordpress.com 
> http://hypercomputation.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj at melroch.se> To: 
>> Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
>> <xetex at tug.org> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
>> 4:58:36 PM Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Transliteration mapping
>>  for Greek ?
>> 
>> 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
> f
>> 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)
>> 
>> 
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