[XeTeX] Greek XeLaTeX

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi Alexandros,

	Though I sympathize with your goal and always thought that LaTex&Co
	would be better off if it had its commands in different languages.

	But, Xe(La)TeX is a macro language and as such "predefined".
	Though you can rename the command names it would make it harder
	to exchange information and get help from non greeks or whatever 
	language one would set-up such a system. Furthermore, you make it harder
	for those who are beginners to Xe(La)TeX to learn the TeX way of doing things.
	That is if they take documentation off the web or other books they will end up
	using a mix of your "GreekXe(La)Tex" and the officially defined commands.

	One possibility though would be to develop a preprocessor that translated the greek
	commands to Xe(La)Tex (aka English). This way if some did have a problem they could
	just run the preprocessor over the input and recieve an "official" Xe(La)TeX source that
	can be shared. Such a preprocessor could be written in perl or even in Tex proper.
	You would need only to identify the commands (usually preceded by a "\"), parse for 
	paramaters, look in a translation table for greek and exchange them with the english
	counterpart. If the command or parameter is not found in the table just do nothing.
	This is somewhat simplified, but i believe a better approach.

	regards
		Keith.

Am 12.10.2010 um 08:21 schrieb Alexandros Gotsis:

> 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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