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Showing posts from October, 2009

Typing Greek

If you pursue a degree in biblical studies, you will need to learn to type using appropriate typsetting conventions for ancient Greek. Ancient Greek (including the LXX and New Testament) uses the polytonic (multiple-accent) system. For the most part, modern Greek (officially since 1982 ) uses a simplified system called monotonic with the ancient accents reduced to one, and the breathing marks omitted. What is Unicode? Unicode is a system devised to represent all major languages and writing systems (including those with non-Western alphabets like Greek or Hebrew) without having to change fonts to do it (visit the Unicode Consortium for more information, or see the Wikipedia article). The advantage to using Unicode for ancient Greek is that the letters and accents are fully composed (no problems with letter spacing). This also means that language-specific data can travel across the Internet and across computing platforms (PC or Mac) without distortion. Unicode is replacing al