Gentium Plus Font appearing as Western-style font only

Phrixos · Newbie Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 3

Hello.

From Windows 98 on through XP, Vista, and now Windows 7 and trying both Gentium Basic and now Gentium Plus, I have tried to use Gentium fonts, but each time I do, the same thing happens.The font comes out looking like just another Western font (Times New Roman, etc.) There is no hint of Greek Letters. Even opening the Windows font file itself, the same thing happens.

I'm a wizened old computer user, but I can't figure this out.

Ani ideas out there?

floris_v · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 5:51 am Post subject:

I downloaded Gentium Plus from http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium_download#02b091ae and installed it and didn't have any problems with the Greek - nice set of characters, including a lot of archaic letters.
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Phrixos · Newbie Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 3

Hello floris_v, and thank you for replying. I downloaded my file from the same source.

This is a real headbanger. Do I take it you too have no solution?

floris_v · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 6:54 am Post subject:

I'm confused. You can't directly type the Greek as you could with much older fonts where the Greek set was put in place of the Latin alphabet but the Gentium Plus (that contains a whopping lot of characters anyway) does contain a whole bunch of Greek characters, including some archaic ones like the digamma. Check out Insert - Special characters, then scroll down in that list or select Basic Greek and Greek Extended.
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Phrixos · Newbie Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 3

Hello again,

I just came across this note in the Gentium File's documentation.

"Encoding:
The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support
Unicode text in order to access letters other than the standard alphabet.
Most Windows applications provide basic Unicode support. You will, however,
need some way of entering Unicode text into your document."

Could this be the problem? (I've been a computer user for years, but I never had to wrestle with Unicode, so, beyond knowing that it is something very basic*, I don't even know what it is.(*Shouldn't Word (2007) be able to handle it?)

How and what do I check to see if Unicode is supported on my machine?

floris_v · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 7:08 am Post subject:

I'm on Vista with OOo 3.4 (developer snapshot) and LibreOffice 3.5 and both display Unicode well enough.If you want to type Greek text, you may need to add a Greek keyboard in the Control Panel - Country Settings - Keyboards and Languages (I have a Dutch version of Windows, so the exact names may differ from yours).
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