greek-inputenc

Greek input encoding definition files

Author:: Apostolos Syropoulos, Dimitrios Filippou, Günter Milde
Copyright:: © 1999 Dimitrios Filippou, © 2000 Apostolos Syropoulos, © 2013, 2023 Günter Milde <milde@users.sf.net>
Licence:: This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3 of this license or any later version.
Homepage:: https://codeberg.org/milde/greek-tex
Latest Release:: https://ctan.org/pkg/greek-inputenc

Abstract

This package provides input encoding definition files for the Greek script for use with inputenc.

Files

Input encoding definitions:

lgrenc.dfu: Greek UTF-8 support with inputenc

Input encoding file for UTF-8 comprising Greek letters and other symbols present in the LGR encoding.

iso-8859-7.def

Greek input encoding file for ISO 8859-7 by Apostolos Syropoulos.

macgreek.def

Greek input encoding file for Macintosh (ELOT 823) by Dimitrios Filippou.

This file translates to a Latin transliteration particular to the LGR font encoding. Drawbacks include: Latin characters in PDF strings (hyperref bookmarks and TOC sidebar, cf. Greek and hyperref), no kerning between accented characters.

Test examples and output:

greek-utf8.tex: greek-utf8.pdf (comprehensive example)
inputenc-iso-8859-7.tex: inputenc-iso-8859-7.pdf (basic test)

HTML documentation was generated from the literate source with PyLit and from reStructuredText with Docutils.

Installation

If possible, get this package from your distribution using its installation manager.

Otherwise, make sure LaTeX can find the files ending in .def and .dfu:

Download and unpack the package or just the required file(s).
Copy, move, or link the files to a suitable place in the TeX Directory Structure (TDS) and run texhash, or place them in the current working directory (e.g. for testing).

Usage

The April 2018 LaTeX release changed the default encoding for 8-bit LaTeX from 7-bit ASCII to utf-8. Hence, the \usepackage[<encoding>]{inputenc} command is only required with the legacy 8-bit encodings. [ltnews28]

However, literal Unicode characters are only set up, if they are supported by a declared font encoding. This package works with the LGR font encoding (requires greek-fontenc). Specify the LGR font encoding with any combination of fontenc, the “greek” option for Babel, or the textalpha or alphabeta packages, e.g.

\usepackage[LGR,T1]{fontenc}

\usepackage{textalpha}
\usepackage[greek,english]{babel}

See greek-utf8.tex for an example.

By default, text containing Greek Unicode characters must be marked up with a command that selects a font encoding supporting the Greek script, e.g. by setting the Babel language to greek or polutonikogreek

Athens (Greek: \foreignlanguage{greek}{Αθήνα};
        Ancient Greek: \foreignlanguage{greek}{Ἀθῆναι})
is the capital of Greece.

This is a generic feature of 8-bit LaTeX – an equivalent restriction holds for the Cyrillic script.

With the textalpha or alphabeta packages (provided as part of greek-fontenc), Greek Unicode literals can be used without special markup also in non-Greek documents (with some limitations).

Warning

LGR is no “standard font encoding”. Latin characters and some other ASCII symbols are mapped to Greek equivalents if LGR is the active font encoding. (See usage.pdf for a description of this Latin-Greek transliteration.)

This means you need an explicit font-encoding switch for Latin words and abbreviations in Greek text, e.g., not:

\foreignlanguage{greek}{ηία αντίσταση 750 kΩ}

but

\foreignlanguage{greek}{ηία αντίσταση 750 \ensureascii{k}Ω}

Special care is also required with the question mark characters:

The Unicode standard says character 003B SEMICOLON (and not 037E) is the preferred character for Greek question mark.
The LGR font encoding maps the semicolon to a middle dot (ano teleia), while the Latin question mark is mapped to the erotimatiko.

As a result, only the deprecated character 037E GREEK QUESTION MARK works with both, Xe/LuaTeX and 8-bit TeX.

Alternatively, the textalpha and alphabeta packages from greek-fontenc can be loaded with the “keep-semicolon” option.

Changelog

1.3	2013-05-17	New maintainer.
		Unicode support with the standard “utf8” option.
1.4	2013-07-16	Bugfix for GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO WITH PSILI/DASIA.
		Drop “greek” from macro names for ancient characters.
		\ypogegrammeni and \prosgegrammeni instead of \|.
1.4.1	2013-07-18	Bugfix: wrong breathings psilioxia -> dasiaoxia.
1.5	2014-09-14	Use named accent macros for Greek accents.
		Documentation update (warn of ;-conversion).
1.5.1	2015-06-04	Fix definition of spacing diacritical characters in utf8.dfu.
1.6	2015-08-05	Fix output of accented characters with “textalpha” if the current font encoding is not LGR (wrap in ensuregreek).
		Map GREEK … SYMBOL characters.
1.7	2019-07-11	Use LICR macros instead of transliteration and remove \textbullet substitution character from iso-8859-7.def. (Missing characters will now result in the standard inputenc error message.)
1.8	2023-02-21	Add definition for capital koppa to lgrenc.dfu.
		Use \ypogegrammeni for mute iota also with capitals.
		Use \textdexiakeraia and \textaristerikeraia for the Greek numeral signs.
1.8.1	2023-02-23	Fix broken links in the documentation.
1.8.2	2023-03-02	Next try to fix links.

References

[ltnews28]

LaTeX Project Team LaTeX News 28, April 2018. https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/ltnews28.pdf

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.