[XeTeX] Assignment of codes (particularly \catcode) based on Unicode data

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

> pieces of software, so is cross-compatible with other stuff. Third, as a
> non-Greek I can't comment on the technical correctness of what you say!

Obviously we are educated people here and I would not dare to say that you do not speak
English...


> Is there some place I could see this discussed in detail? (I'm a bit
> confused as to what 'GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI' represents
> if it's not the upper case of 'GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH
> PSILI': I
> notice in xgreek you map U+1F18 to U+0395 for upper casing and U+1F10
> for lower casing.)
 
First of all let me say that Greek is not English and therefore there are
things here that you do not encounter in English. Now, one must realize that
the acute accent (tonos in Unicode parlance), is not part of the letter as 

the umlaut in the case of the letter ö. The tonos is there to indicate where
the stress should go in a word. The tonos is dropped in words where all
letters are capital or uppercase. As in English and other languages the
first letter of the word that follows a period is always is in uppercase
form. However, the rest of the word is in lowercase form and this means that
accents should not be dropped and this is exactly the reason why you write

Έλα! Άρη, έλα! (Do you see the accent in Epsilon and Alpha?) 


Naturally, the same principle applies to texts that are written in the polytonic
version of Greek. Now there is an exception to this general rule. In Greek
the word ή means or. However, the feminine article is η so in order to avoid
confusion, ή retains its accent when is uppercased.



Now, I think it Jonathan that brought in to the discussion the "problem" with
the dialytika that appear when a word is transformed into uppercase. This problem
was solved in Omega by using an Omega Transformation Process. However, I solved
the same problem in an OpenType font that included Caps & Small Caps. The following
text 


Ο άυλος αυλός ή η Αγγελική με το σκάι;

should be transformed as follows:

Ο ΑΫΛΟΣ ΑΥΛΟΣ Ή Η ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΗ ΜΕ ΤΟ ΣΚΑΪ;

A.S.



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Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece