Greek Text for a Greek Site

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Greek Text for a Greek Site

tchallies

8:54 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

I feel really dumb but I'm stumped by something that should be very simple. I have to make a site that deals with classical Greek. I have absolutely no idea how to make that work. I would like it to be as simple as possible for the client to add Greek to the site (I'll be using Movabletype or something similar). Right now, if I go to a Greek site and copy their code into a program like Homesite, all I see is question marks where the Greek characters should be. What on earth am I doing wrong?

monkeythumpa

9:02 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

You need a greek character set. I am not sure which one will work, Google "Greek charset" but you need to put a line of code that looks like this into your document:

(this one might work, try it out)

tchallies

9:14 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

I tried that, but that doesn't do it. Again, if I copy the code from a Greek site where everything looks great to Homesite on my PC it just plain doesn't work. If I make an exact copy of a Greek site and upload it to my server it still doesn't work. I'm totally baffled.

rjohara

9:43 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

Classical Greek (polytonic Greek) is a bit trickier than you might think. By far the easiest way to do it is by encoding the page as Unicode; this is the encoding statement that should go right after your <html> tag:

You may be several steps away from the solution. The first thing you might try is to check Alan Wood's Unicode extended Greek reference page [alanwood.net]: do you see the Greek text on the left? If not, you've got font problems or browser-setting problems, and will need to take care of those first.

tchallies

9:52 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

Again, it all looks fine in my browser. But if I copy it to my local computer and drop it all into Homesite, it does not work. The characters show when I'm browsing his site, but they don't show from my local PC.

rjohara

10:19 pm on Nov 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

Then the problem must be with the Homesite application (I've never used it and so don't know how it works). Perhaps it has a setting to specify the character encoding (Unicode or utf-8)? You might start another thread asking for specific advice with respect to Homesite.