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

Windows XP

Note: the following was test on Windows XP Professional. It is assumed that support for Unicode in Windows XP Home is comparable.

Windows XP is capable of viewing documents with polytonic Greek out of the box, displaying precomposed characters via Palatino Linotype, and combining diacriticals via Lucida Sans Unicode. Make sure on installing Windows XP that you enable multilanguage support (and if you're interested in Hebrew, Sanskrit, or Asian Languages, you should also add support for complex and Asian languages).

Windows XP comes with a stable version of Internet Explorer 6 (In my experience, Internet Explorer 6 is not as stable under Windows 98 as it is under Windows XP). One can also use Netscape/Mozilla browsers in both versions of Windows as described for Windows 95/98.

In XP, Notepad can be used with the polytonic Greek keyboard supplied on the Windows XP CD to type polytonic Greek. In XP, simply set Palatino Linotype as your font in Notepad, and install the polytonic Greek keyboard using the 'add settings' command in the start menu. Detailed instructions will be made available in the future at on the Notepad page.

If you find the standard polytonic keyboard in Windows XP difficult to use, you can also use SCUnipad for Unicode data entry, or use Tavultesoft Keyman or Antioch in combination with Microsoft Word (97 or later). Both the SCUnipad and Antioch keyboard systems are more familiar to contemporary classicists than the standard Windows XP polytonic keyboard.

A screenshot of Internet Explorer 6 in Windows XP RC2 with Palatino Linotype (precomposed, UTF-8), as installed (with nothing added)

Click to zoom

The native encoding for Windows XP is the UTF-16 encoding (little endian, to be technical, but don't worry about that). Support for characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane is the most complete. Latin, Greek, Greek Extended, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and Devanagari (among other script ranges) are all located in the Basic Multilingual Plane. Windows XP also has very good support for UTF-8 (the most common encoding for Unicode used on the web).

All of the fonts listed in the fonts section of this site have been tested with Windows XP except ClearlyU, which was not designed for non-X-server-based systems. All work well.

Windows Polytonic Greek Keyboard

Global Software Development Windows Keyboard Layouts

Some users may not want to use the Microsoft polytonic Greek keyboard; for one thing, it is sometimes quite counter-intuitive. There are very good alternatives available, however, in David Perry's Type for Scholars keyboards and Ralph Hancock's Antioch package for Microsoft Word.

Tavultesoft Keyman and David Perry's Keyboards for Scholars

David Perry's keyboards from his Type for Scholars page are particularly easy to use, provided that you have Windows 2000 or Windows XP and have downloaded and installed Tavultesoft Keyman, a program that allows one to use customized keyboards in Windows.

Antioch by Ralph Hancock

To Install Fonts

The Palatino Linotype font, which can be used with precomposed characters (normalization form C), comes pre-installed in Windows XP. The Arial Unicode MS font can be installed in the process of installing Microsoft Word. All other fonts can be installed in one of three ways. Make sure that you scan the font file for viruses before installing (especially .exe or executable files, which can very easily conceal viruses).

Installing Another Unicode-Capable Browser

Windows XP comes with the Internet Explorer 6.0 web browser, which has full Unicode capabilities.

For those of you who prefer Netscape products, you may already have a version of Netscape capable of reading Unicode Polytonic Greek: all versions of the Netscape web browser for Windows after Netscape 4.x (which is to say, Netscape 4.0, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.7.1-4.7.9, Netscape 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.1, 6.1.1, 6.2, etc. and Netscape 7.0) support Unicode polytonic Greek. If you have a version of Netscape higher than 4.5, you should be relatively ok. If you don't, consider upgrading to Netscape 7 or Netscape 4.79 (if you are nervous about Netscape 7, which is a far superior product to Netscape 6).

If you do prefer Netscape products but have a version of Netscape earlier than 4.5, I would strongly suggest that you wait a few weeks and download Netscape 7. You can go to the Netscape website and click the "Download" link to download the latest versions of Netscape (7.0 will be released some time in August or September of 2002; Netscape 6.0, which is not recommended, was released on 14 November 2000). Follow the instructions from there.

If you're adventurous, try Mozilla: this is the open-source browser created by Netscape and other developers upon which Netscape 6 and 7 is based. See the page on Mozilla for more details.

 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!		 ▣ Home | ◈ Contents | △ Section | ◁ Previous | ◁ Next