Unicode Polytonic Greek for the World Wide Web
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Unicode Polytonic Greek
for the World Wide Web

Version 0.9.7

D R A F T

Typing Greek Text with SC UniPad

Sharmahd Computing GmbH has created a Unicode text editor for Windows called SC UniPad. This text editor will work even without a Unicode font - there is a bitmap font built into UniPad (note that this bitmap font won't work with webpages or anything else, so you should still get Athena or some other Unicode font).

UniPad has the complete Greek character sets: the basic Greek characters, the combining diacriticals, and the polytonic precomposed characters. James Naughton has created a simple keyboard mapping file which allows one to type polytonic Greek in SC UniPad using dead keys for the diacritical marks (superceding my earlier keyboard mapping which placed the common precomposed character / diacrtical combinations on individual keystrokes). This will work easily for characters with a single diacritical mark.

Here's a text typed in UniPad.

If you have Windows 98 (or 95, or 98SE, or ME) and look at this text with your View > Source command on your browser, you'll see that it looks like nonsense. UTF-8, the most common Unicode encoding (and the one used in these pages, uses from one to four bytes (for Greek, two bytes; a byte being for our purposes an eight-bit digital "word") to represent each character. If you want to type this is SC UniPad, all you have to do is this:

Three things to remember when using UniPad with Windows 95 or Windows 98 (or SE or ME):

1. Save your texts as UTF-8
2. Save them with an HTML or TXT extension (I'd save them with a .html extension and add the HTML right there in UniPad
3. Remember to assign a choice of Unicode-capable fonts in the web page using CSS.

• SC UniPad home page
• Attic keyboard: this is an XML file that configures the keyboards in SC UniPad. To download it, right click on the link (a normal click will pull it up into your browser) and select the location where you want to save it. To install it, copy it to the Program Files\SC UniPad directory and use the Keyboard > Load command inside SC UniPad to install it. This will only work with SC Unipad. The XML file itself should be treated as having a limited GPL-like license - copy it and change it, but let me know what your changes are, if you don't mind, so I can incorporate them in my version if I think others would find them useful; I would GPL the XML file if UniPad itself were under the GPL.

Note: the Attic keyboard is supplied by Mr. Naughton at no charge with no warranty, guarantee, or representation of quality or fitness of any kind from either him or me; it works for me, but that doesn't mean that it will work for you. I have no affiliation with the makers of the UniPad software or Mr. Naughton, and so cannot guarantee or warrant their products.

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Unicode Polytonic Greek for the World Wide Web Version 0.9.7  Copyright © 1998-2002 Patrick Rourke. All rights reserved. D R A F T - Under Development  Please do not treat this as a published work until it is finished!

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