babel-greek

Babel support for Greek

Licence

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3 of this license or any later version.

Abstract

Babel-greek is a contributed package providing support for the Greek language and script via the Babel system.

In 1997, Apostolos Syropoulos added support for the Greek language to the “babel” package. The file greek.ldf provides options for monotonic (single-diacritic) and polytonic (multiple-diacritic) modes of writing.

There is now experimental support for Unicode-aware TeX engines (XeTeX/LuaTeX).

News

1.4

2013-05-17

New maintainer.

 

The encoding definition file lgrenc.def moved to the greek-fontenc package.

1.5

2013-06-21

bugfixes and cleanup,

 

LICR macros in string definitions,

 

LGR font encoding not used with XeTeX/LuaTeX,

 

input “xgreek-fixes.def” from polyglossia with Xe/LuaTeX.

1.5a

2013-07-02

fix LaTeX bugs babel/3707, babel/4303 and babel/4305

1.6

2013-07-19

Experimental support for XeTeX/LuaTeX.

Requirements

Typesetting Greek texts requires a font containing Greek glyphs.

The “babel-greek” package requires the babel base package. Greek text fonts in the LGR encoding and the encoding definition file lgrenc.def from the greek-fontenc package are required with 8-bit TeX engines.

Use with XeTeX/LuaTeX requires greek-euenc.def from greek-fontenc for Greek LICR macros and xgreek-fixes.def from polyglossia for correct up/downcasing .

“Plain” TeX is currently not supported. Patches are welcome.

Installation

If possible, get this package from your distribution using its installation manager.

Otherwise, make sure LaTeX can find the required files:

Usage

Pass the “greek” option to babel:

\usepackage[greek]{babel}

For polytonic greek, set the language attribute “polutoniko”:

\languageattribute{greek}{polutoniko}

For details see usage.pdf, greek.pdf and the babel documentation. Literal input of Greek characters is possible with the greek-inputenc package and XeTeX/LuaTeX.

Greek text fonts

With the XeTeX or LuaTeX engines, the user should ensure that the choosen font contains the required glyphs (the default Latin Modern fonts miss them). Examples for suitable fonts are the CM-unicode or the Linux Libertine OpenType fonts as well as any system-wide installed OTF fonts that support Greek (e.g. Deja Vu).

The LGR font encoding is the de-facto standard for typesetting Greek with 8-bit LaTeX. Fonts in this encoding include the CB fonts (matching CM), grtimes (Greek Times), Kerkis (matching URW Bookman), and the GFS font collection. Setup of these fonts as Greek variant to matching Latin fonts is facilitated by the substitutefont package.

The LGR font encoding generates Greek characters via an ASCII transliteration. This enables simple input with a Latin keyboard. Characters with diacritics are selected by ligature definitions in the font (see usage.pdf).

A major drawback of this transliteration is, that you cannot access Latin letters if LGR is the active font encoding (e.g. in documents or parts of documents given the Babel language greek or polutionikogreek). This means that for every Latin-written word or acronym an explicite language-switch is required. This problem can only be solved via a font-encoding comprising Latin and Greek like the hypothetic T7 or Unicode (with XeTeX or LuaTeX).