Once you proposed to use a suitable convert program to get suitable
8-bit pattern files derivable from the utf8 ones used by xelatex. At
that time you said that the team was lacking the necessary skills to
create such a program.
Therefore I accepted your statement and did not insist nor did I
support such an operation.
Two or three years ago Günter Milde, the new maintainer of the Greek
support for babel, introduced the LICR and added to the basic support a
little collection of packages that allow the Greeks, and anybody who
uses Greek, to enter Greek text with Greek characters and/or with a
Latin transliteration with special diacritic macros that allow to
directly address the real glyphs in the LGR fonts. The existing
gr*hyph5.tex files (where the * stands for a=ancient, m=monotonic,
p=polytonic) were made many years before and could not manage the direct
addressing of the upper half plane of the LGR encoding; without LICR
access to the diacritically marked glyphs, such access was the result of
a large set of ligatures that implied a glyph substitution between
selected ASCII chars and upper half plane LGR chars.
The gr*hyp5.tex files had to be updated with the patterns containing the
upper half plane glyphs; this is what I did about two years ago, and
sent the new files for testing and correcting to Dimitrios Filippou, the
author/maintainer of the version 5 ones. Since Dimitrios had very heavy
duties and could not spend time in this operation, the new ones, with
version number 6, are now finally in the hands of a new Greek TeX user
who masters not only polytonic Greek but also ancient Greek; we have an
agreement for a work flow of interaction between the new Greek TeXpert
and me, so that eventually we succeed in uploading the new corrected and
extended version when typesetting Greek text with 8-bit engines.
Another solution would be to derive 8-bit pattern files from the
existing ones in utf8 encoding and omitting the ligature mechanism, but
Latin transliteration would not work any more. Another would be to
cancel Greek hyphenation for 8-bit engines and force people who need
typesetting Greek texts to use XeLaTeX (and, if it worked in a simple
way, also with LuaLaTeX, but this unfortunately is out of my and
Apolstolo's reach). But the Greek who use the TeX system are mostly
university people working in experimental sciences and do not want to
give up the excellent support for mathematics for which pdfLaTeX is
still superior (at leas in their eyes) to XeLaTeX. Therefore the
situation should remain the actual one, with the upgrade to version 6 of
the 8-bit LGR compliant pattern files.
Claudio
On 12/04/2016 12:12, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>and i do not see any means for getting
>rid of them and of the 8-bit LGR encoding.
What did you mean by that?
