Selection menu for using Greek fonts

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Select the appropriate machine/system type

1. MS-DOS Greek for MS-DOS machines
2. Windows 3.11/95 Writing Greek on Windows 3.11/Windows 95 machines
3. MacOS Greek under MacOS
4. Amiga Writing Greek using an Amiga
5. X-Windows Writing Greek with X-Windows

Computing in Greek ?

A severe problem to read and write Greek on the Net is the combination of special characters needed for writing in Greek and the small size of Greek market. The problem became more complicated due to the lack of any nation-wide standard for reading, writing and printing in Greek. Every single company proposed and followed it's own Greek codeset. Sometimes variant codesets used even by a single computer company making the development and establishment of a standard a summer's night dream. This is a paradigm on how development of communication can diversify people instead of unite them.

Finally, one of all codesets seems to be the most prominent for the moment.It's known as ISO-8859-7 and has very limited differences from the ELOT 928 (ELOT is the Greek Standard Organization) the codeset used by Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. It's encouraging that some of the big hardware ventors they provide internationalized version of their operating systems which include now support for the Greek language.

Another page with Greek fonts ?

This page's aim is not to be "another one" of the many already covering the topic. Our page preferes to act as general reference to resources and instructions, a tool to find and install what it's more fit to your needs describing in a simple, straightforward manner.

Another purpose is to provide an alternative mirror site for some of these programs and resources because we know the connectivity problems that Greece faces with the rest of the world.

Few general introductory comments

The first thing to be comprehended when trying to install Greek fonts in a system is that reading Greek and writing in Greek are two related but distinct things (and sending email in Greek a third one).

• Reading Greek

The only things needed to read Greek are the appropriate fonts and to define properly the encoding (codeset) you are about to use.

• Writing in Greek

You need everything needed to read Greek PLUS :

A way to tell to the computer which key in the keyboard prints which greek character. Technically speaking this means you need the appropriate keyboard driver (keyboard layout in mac terminology).

• Greek and World Wide Web

The above mentionned things meet the needs for having full access into Greek documents through WWW.

• Greek and server/client model applications

We mention here server/client model applications despite the fact that WWW falls to this category. The great majority of those applications (IRC, sendmail etc) they can support Greek but the are not configured to do it by default. The result is a great variety of servers and clients that trasmit and receive Greek properly or not. Therefore some of the inteded recipients get perfectly your trasmission (e.g. your mail) but others they receive nothing but garbage.

Since Internet is communicating with others and not isolating ourselves from the others ( as happenned with the standard for reading Greek ) we suggest to avoid sending pure Greek trasmissions unless you are sure that anyone can read them. We hope soon Greek will be a standard and all we can use them bypassing greeklish.

ELOT 928 font for DOS machines is now available (16KB) thanks to Techlink.

Arial.exe(161Kb) is a common ELOT 928 font for Windows (3.1 , 3.11 and 95) found in many Greek servers. Originally created among other fonts by Pouliadis Associates Corp. is one of the many fonts (183 Kb) you can find in HRI's collection (783 Kb) in USA.

To write in Greek as mentionned above you need a keyboard driver. Such driver is wingreek.zip (7Kb). Many thanks to HRI (Hellenic Resources Network) and to Alejandros Pseirakis who was originally distributed the driver.

Greek support on MacOS

ELOT 928 was a standard for the world of MS-Windows. Mac users are using Greek fonts and keyboard layouts specially designed for Apple machines using a different encoding (ELOT 823).

There is available a package (218 Kb)containing :

• Three converted ELOT 928 fonts based on those distributed by Pouliadis Associates Corp. namely HellasTimes, HellasFun (proportional fonts) and HellasCourrier (fixed font).
• One ELOT 928 font based on the ELOT823 GrHelvetica named HellasHelvetica.
• A keyboard driver (layout) supporting ELOT928 encoding.
• Instructions to install the package and how to configure Netscape to read and write Greek ELOT928 text.

The very same fonts can be used to read and send email written in Greek.

The same package is mirrored in U.S. by HRI.

If you are only interested to use Netscape with Greek ELOT928 textAndreas Prilop came up with a more elegant solution. A patchwhich when applied to Netscape changes the encoding and someone can use native Mac Greek fonts (ELOT 823) to view ELOT928 texts. This patch is available from any info-mac mirror site.

ELOT928 characters and Amiga

X - Windows

Dealing with X-windows make things a bit more complicated. Let's see step by step some basics for the fonts on X - windows system.

When yoy run an X-client by default it looks in several places to find the fonts which are goinf to be used. You can see which are those folders by issuing the command :

 xset -q 

 /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ 

 xset +fp new_fonts_full_path 

 mkfontdir 

 netscape -xrm "*documentFonts.charset*iso8859-7:       iso-8859-1" 

• 75dpi or 100dpi fonts made by HRNet team and Angelos Haritsis. Specific instructions to install these fonts are available from HRNet's server
• DUTH-WWW is offering another font's set. Again particular instructions are available
.
• Finally a third set made available by National Technical University of Athens and Panagiotis Christias. As the other two there are specific instructions