A simple tutorial how you can use Greek fonts with accents etc. on your pc.

To start with, to view fonts in a webpage, you will need the same font installed on your system as was used when making that page. The problem with the "symbol" font that comes installed with windows is dat the "spiritus" and accents etc. in Greek text is not displayed. This problem can be solved by using a unicode font, but older systems may not be able to view this properly and even some new pc's wil have to have some regional setting changed in the control panel.

That is why at HELLENIKE PAIDEIA, we will use the basic-greek font (bgreek.ttf) which can be downloaded by clicking on the "Get Greek Fonts" button below.

Now put the font in your fonts folder, which is usually located on the path "C:\windows\fonts", sometime all text-viewers (even Internet Explorer) or even the operatting system should be restarted for the font to be correctly installed.

You can now type in Greek. All the greek laters you need are linked to a key on the keyboard, and so is the extra Greek puncuation. When typing in a "real" text editor like Word you can just change the font to "Greek Basis" and start typing. In Internet Explorer, however, things are a little bit less user-friendly.

The input-forms here at Ancient Worlds only know plain text. This on itself is not a problem. And I'm sure everybody who writes a Greek post every now and then will be quite quickly used to this. You just type your text with accents and all, but in plain text it will look something like kai; oJ Alkibiavdhs: a{ndre~. you can make this look like "normal Greek text" by using the font tag to change the font to "greek basis", like this: < font face = "greek basis"> (close the spaces in the tag), And DON'T forget to change the type from "plain" to HTML. If you do that, the text will look like it should in Greek (see alpha-examples below). Note that the extra s, the long sigma is "hidden" under the tilde "~". When typing a letter that has an accent or something, you write the letter like normal, and then press a key to put the accent on it.

Extra tip: when using Greek text, it may be handy to choose the size one or two point larger than you would with ordiniary European fonts, like Times New Roman. You can do this with the size-atribute in the font tag, i.e. < font face="Greek basis" size="5" >

The different alpha's you can make are:

So when you type the text in the inputbox when you are making a post for AW, it seems like you have a lot of extra letters, because those are not depicted in the right way. In editors that can work with anything other than plain text, you do not have that problem. Below you can see 3 lines of the "same" text, but now in proper Greek.The first line is a sentence in English about the Agamemnon. The third line is how it will eventually appear in your post. But when you're typing it in the input-field, it will look like the middle line.

Below is the keyboard-lay out. It may not look very clear at first, but Im sure that it will, after using it a couple of times.