Embedding Greek in Your Documents

Introduction

The Perseus WWW site currently uses three styles for viewing Greek on the Web. They are Latin transliteration, Beta code, and ``Greek''. This last option produces SMK GreekKeys® characters when viewed from a Macintosh and Sgreek characters when viewed from Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately, there aren't yet any multi-accent Greek fonts for X windows.

For the sake of convenience all our Greek is actually stored as Beta code and then converted when a user asks for another one of the display types. This system works well for dymanic documents such as the text browser or the lexicon, but it doesn't allow you to see Greek in your static documents.

This document details how to incorporate Greek into your documents so that anyone who can see Greek in Perseus can see it in your document.

The Basics

Here are four simple steps to a document with Greek:

Create a document with Greek in it. The Greek text should be in Beta code. (See our Beta code reference if you need to.)

Mark the beginning of Greek text with a <G> tag and the end with a </G> tag. You can take a look at a document that has some embedded Greek. Since most Web browser ignore tags that they don't understand, you won't be able to see the <G> tags unless you view the source of the document.

Add the following text to the beginning of the URL of your document:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/filter?filter=greek&url=
You should now see the document in Greek if you have the correct font settings. Here is a link to the document mentioned above with this text added to the URL: document with converted Greek.

Change all links to your document so that they have the same extended URL.

Details

You'll notice that this filter leaves the links in your documents alone (except that it expands them). If you want the links in your document to point to filtered documents, add ``&scope=dir'' right after the ``filter'' argument in the URL. This causes all links to documents in the current directory to be filtered.

If you add ``&scope=all'' to the URL, all links in your document will point to filtered documents.

To see a simple silter that runs on English text, try ``filter=encyclopedia'' instead of ``filter=greek''. This filter link words that are entries in the Perseus encyclopedia.

If you have any questions about filters or have an idea for a new filter, please e-mail me at:
dasmith@perseus.tufts.edu