Homer: Odyssey, Book 1 (Ionic Greek). v1. 14 Jul 07

[HarryT]

By popular request, here's an example of how to do ancient (Ionic) Greek on the Reader. This is Book 1 of Homer's Odyssey. The font is rendered by embedding the public domain ancient Greek "SPIonic" font into the document. It slows down page turns somewhat, but not unbearably.

If you can read ancient Greek, this actually works very nicely indeed.

Enjoy (?)

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[NatCh]

Heh, maybe I'll load this one up to flummox my wife's snooty academic colleagues (actually, very few of the folks she works with directly are snooty at all, but they'd still be impressed )

[JSWolf]

Harry, Have you proofed this for any misspellings? No nice cover page or ToC? You're really slipping.

[HarryT]

It's intended more as a demonstration of font embedding than as a finished book.

[linguist]

Looks pretty good, Harry - the only thing it has a little glitch with is breathing + circumflex together, where they sort of mash into each other. Still, this is certainly easily usable if not absolutely gorgeous. Thank you for showing the way.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by linguist

the only thing it has a little glitch with is breathing + circumflex together, where they sort of mash into each other.

That's a problem with the free SPIonic font. There are probably other fonts available which would do it better; I used SPIonic simply because it's the one I use a great deal.

[bookbinder]

Harry,
could you please tell me how to embed a font into a file so that the Sony Reader will display it? I'm working on a document with some greek words in it, and I haven't been able to make them display correctly. Thanks.

[HarryT]

If you're using Book Designer, all you have to do is:

1. Click the "Make Sony Reader Book" button.
2. Go to the "Options" tab.
3. Add an external font using the area at the right side of the screen.
4. Define one of the "styles" to use that font.
5. Make sure that the appropriate parts of the document use that font.

For modern Greek, however, you really shouldn't need to do that. The standard fonts used by the Sony Reader have Greek letters in them. You only really need a separate font for ancient Greek because of the accents it uses - modern Greek doesn't have accents.

[bookbinder]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you're using Book Designer, all you have to do is:

1. Click the "Make Sony Reader Book" button.
2. Go to the "Options" tab.
3. Add an external font using the area at the right side of the screen.
4. Define one of the "styles" to use that font.
5. Make sure that the appropriate parts of the document use that font.

For modern Greek, however, you really shouldn't need to do that. The standard fonts used by the Sony Reader have Greek letters in them. You only really need a separate font for ancient Greek because of the accents it uses - modern Greek doesn't have accents.

Thanks, Harry. Works like a charm. My problem now is opening an html document in BD that contains some words in greek. BD just ignores them. Any ideas?

[HarryT]

I'm afraid I can't help you there.

[ptrourke]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You only really need a separate font for ancient Greek because of the accents it uses - modern Greek doesn't have accents.

Modern Greek script (monotonic) does actually use a single accent, shaped like the acute polytonic accent.

[HarryT]

Thanks for the correction!