Re: Writting Greek in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Thanos Apollo <public@thanosapollo.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 12:18:40 +0300
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> It's not possible to stack accents of the same type in Greek.  There are
> >> many grammatical rules that are ignored in most input methods that I've
> >> checkout out, such as using specific accents in non vowels.
> >
> > But that is a problem for the user who is typing the sequence to
> > solve.
> 
> Hmmm....  I guess we probably see this differently (literally).  I
> understood the issue when reading this email in emacs-devel web archive.
> 
> I'm attaching an image for you to see what it usually looks like with
> Iosevka Aile font.  In K9 the accents are even covering your own name, this 
> is a bug,
> most fonts do not support this and users should be able to easily type
> "stacking" accents of the same type.

Again, why is it our problem?  If the user wants to have this sequence
for some reason, it is up to the user to select the font that displays
this properly.  Emacs has no business preventing users from typing
nonsensical sequences of codepoints.

> Depending on which greek input is used, the way to type accents is
> different.  For example, in greek-polytonic that was recommended
> previously, to add an oxia (΄), using ";" in us qwerty keyboards, you first
> have to type the vowel & then press ";".  That's the opposite of how
> Greek input methods work, we first type ";" (or the any other character
> representing the accent(s) we want) and then the vowel.
> 
> You can try that by using the "greek" input method or by using
> "setxkbmap gr" to see the differences with greek-polytonic in typing a
> vowel with oxia.
> 
> greek-babel appears to support polytonic accents, but I haven't fully
> tested it due to unfamiliarity with its keybindings.  I will start
> working on a new greek-polytonic input method similar to what is
> commonly used in proprietary software that most users are familiar
> with. I'm attaching an image of the keybindings commonly used.

I'm not sure this is related.  As I wrote, it is okay for the input
method not to support more than one tonos following a base character.
But that does not (and should not) prevent the user from typing as
many tonos accents as he/she pleases by other means.  The only
requirement from Emacs is not to crash as result of displaying such
sequences.