PPTools/Ppgen/Tutorial/Greek
Overview
Note: The extended Greek processing is currently available only in the development version of ppgen, available [here].
The DP site currently supports only Latin-1 characters for proofreading, and the Proofreading Guidelines document how to handle Greek text in the [Proofreading Guidelines for non-Latin Characters] and in the Transliterating Greek page here in the DP Wiki.
Usually proofers produce transliterated Greek ignoring all accents, and preserving only the rough breathing marks. Sometimes a PM will request that the proofers retain the accents, at which point they probably follow the conventions documented on the Marking Accents page. The basic format, as you probably know, is [Greek: ...] with the transliterated Greek letters in the middle.
As the PPer you will probably want to convert the Greek transliterations to actual Greek Unicode characters for your utf8.txt file and your .html file, and you can do that with the ppgen support for DP's Greek transliteration style. The hardest part will be restoring the accents if you choose to do that, as we generally seem to expect of PPers these days. But ppgen also has support to help with that, modelled after similar support in the Guiguts Greek Transliteration menu. More on that later.
Additionally, if your project has Greek characters or character+accent combinations that ppgen does not understand, or if you want something different than the standard handling, you may tell ppgen what you want it do generate.
By default ppgen will not perform extended Greek processing. If you want it, you must enable that processing by using the .gk command.
Simple Greek Processing
To enable Greek processing, simply place a .gk command anywhere in your source file. I recommend having it near the top for good documentation. If all you want is for ppgen to handle standard DP Greek transliterations (without retained accents) during processing, you can use the simplest form of .gk, without options:
.gk
If you need to specify additional diacritic handling (for example, a character that ppgen cannot handle automatically), then you can use 2 options of .gk, in= and out= as follows:
.gk in=in-value out=out-value where: in-value is a character string that will appear within a Greek transliteration somewhere in the source text out-value is the character string that ppgen should use to replace the in-value.
The Greek values you supply will be applied before any of the built-in ones, and thus you can override the standard ppgen handling if you need to.
For out-value you may specify a UTF-8 character directly, such as α or you may specify character unicode value(s) in the form \unnnn (e.g., \u03b1).
What characters are built-in?
To see the complete list of built-in Greek characters in the version of ppgen that you're using, you can run ppgen with the -cvg or --listcvg option. With that option, ppgen will list all of the built-in diacritic and Greek characters to output file ppgen-cvglist.txt and terminate.
Example: ppgen.py -cvg
You'll notice some Greek characters that do not fit our usual Greek transliteration scheme as shown in the Wiki. They are ones that we've seen commonly used enough over the years that I thought ppgen should have support for them.
Advanced Topics
Emphasis (<g>)
Sometimes authors will use spaced letters (gesperrt) within Greek text for emphasis. ppgen supports the use of <g> markup within [Greek: ...] tags to allow this, if the author has done it.
Marking Accents
As mentioned above, the PM may have requested the proofers to retain accents, and if so they probably used the scheme shown on the Marking Accents page in the DP Wiki. Generally that will result in various characters representing the accents and breathing marks appearing before the character to which they apply.
The authors of Guiguts chose to use a different style, and one which may allow better handling of some odd cases, and I have chosen to follow their lead and provide compatible support in ppgen. This places the additional marks after the character to which they apply. Most PMs do not ask the proofers to retain accents, only rough breathing. So, generally, you should not have much proofers' work to redo (merely changing the rough breathing from an h before a letter to a "(" following it if you need to add additional markings to the letter). If you have a project where the PM asked for retention of the accents you will have a bit more work, but we retain compatibility with Guiguts which should help if any PPers end up using both tools.
(I have adapted the following from a version provided by Tony Browne in No Dumb Questions for PPers. I have edited it somewhat, without, I hope, introducing any errors.)
- The markings are divided into 4 component groups (Group 1, 2, 3, 4 below).
- You supply 1 mark per component; if there's more than 1 diacritic per letter, use more than 1 mark.
- You may find it helpful to check out the behaviour of the Greek characters that follow the component group list. They show all the possible diacritic forms.
- Generally you will examine the letter on the page image, determine which diacritics it has, and place them after the letter in the following sequence:
Group 1: ~ tilde/circumflex = breve _ macron Group 2: ) smooth breathing ( rough breathing Group 3: / acute \ grave Group 4: | iota-subscript + dieresis (Not more than 1 from each group.)
The folowing demonstrate the possible combinations and how they'll look, but not all possible letters:
α ἀ ἁ ἄ ἅ ἂ ἃ ά ὰ ᾶ ἆ ἇ ᾳ ᾀ ᾁ ᾄ ᾅ ᾂ ᾃ ᾴ ᾲ ᾷ ᾆ ᾇ ϊ ΐ ῒ ῗ ᾰ ᾱ Α Ἀ Ἁ Ἄ Ἅ Ἂ Ἃ Ά Ὰ Ἆ Ἇ ᾼ ᾈ ᾉ ᾌ ᾍ ᾊ ᾋ ᾎ ᾏ Ϊ Ᾰ Ᾱ
Example: if you wanted ᾇ you would provide [Greek: a~(|] in your source file.
A few notes:
- For the text Tony was commenting on, he said "Macrons (& breves) are unlikely in this text: circumflex/tilde is much more likely. In any case, macrons & breves cannot be combined with other diacritics."
- The transliterations from the proofers will include the rough breathing mark as an h before the word. So, you might see something like [Greek: ha]. Ppgen will recognize that and produce ἁ automatically without you needing to do anything. But if an additional mark is needed, you will need to remove the h and follow the scheme above. You cannot leave the h, and provide [Greek: ha~|] in your source file. So for ᾇ you would take the proofer-provided [Greek: ha], remove the h, and add the other characters to give [Greek: a~(|].
- The basic approach for using this method would be to find an occurrence of Greek, look at the page image (or original, if necessary) to determine the diacritic marks that are present in the image, and add them to the [Greek: ...] tag after the appropriate letter, removing any extraneous rough-breathing "h" charcters. The you would find the next Greek occurrence, etc.
- After conversion, if any of your accent marks remain as plain source characters, then either you have made an encoding mistake (wrong order, or applied a diacritic mark to a letter that can't carry it), or you've found a bug in the ppgen code.
There are, of course, other methods you might use for providing the Greek transcription. You could, for example, find each occurrence of Greek, locate it on the page image, throw away the DP transliteration completely, and hand-build it from scratch using the online Greek4 tool described on the Transcribing Greek page here in the DP Wiki. Then you would copy the Greek characters from the Greek4 tool and paste it into your ppgen source file.
Applying the transformations to your source file
If you run ppgen normally, and enable the handling of the Greek markup, your source file will have the marked up characters and the output files (-utf8.txt, .html) will have the transformed characters. You may find it beneficial, however, to have the transformations applied to your source file so you can see them more easily while working on the source.
For example, that would allow you to see, in your source file, the characters you still need to work on. This may also be useful to someone who normally uses some other tool (Guiguts, PPQT) rather than ppgen, but wants a simple way to perform the diacritic transformation without having to deal with all the characters manually.
To do that you can use the -f (for filter) command line option.
Example:
ppgen.py -i file-src.txt -f filter.txt (and, optionally, -l to have more informational messages logged)
With the -f option specified, ppgen will read the specified filter file and process any .cv or .gk commands in it. Then ppgen will process the input file specified by -i (the name must still end with -src.txt), perform the diacritic and Greek transformations (if requested by .cv and .gk in the filter file or in the source file), and create a UTF-8 encoded output file named file-cvgout-utf8.txt which should be identical to the input file except for the .cv and .gk transformations.
If you're a ppgen user and happy with the results, you can then rename file-cvgout-utf8.txt to somename-src.txt and continue working on that as the next iteration of your source file.
If you're not a ppgen user, you can rename file-cvgout-utf8.txt to any name you would usually use, and continue working on it with your normal tools.
The filter file
The filter file should normally contain only .cv and .gk commands, which will serve to trigger the transformation processing. If desired, your commands can use the in= and out= operands to request additional character transformations beyond those built-in to ppgen. A minimal filter file to request both diacritic and greek transformations would have simply:
.cv .gk
Other options on .gk
The .gk command contains several other options intended for testing of ppgen itself, but which may also prove useful to a PPer.
pre= specifies a character string that ppgen will place in its output file just before the transformed characters.
suf= specifies a character string that ppgen will place in its output file just after the transformed characters.
keep= has values n (default), a, and b. With keep=a ppgen will retain the original [Greek: ...] transliteration and place it in the output file just after the transformed character. With keep=b ppgen will retain the original markup and place it in the output file just before the transformed character.
quit=y will cause ppgen to terminate processing immediately after performing the diacritic and/or Greek transformations.
done tells ppgen that there are no further .gk commands in the input file. This may save some time with large projects by allowing ppgen to stop looking for .gk commands and begin doing the transformation work.
Examples:
Suppose the input file has a line with This is [Greek: abgd] With Greek processing enabled, the output file will normally contain This is αβγδ If a .gk command specifies ".gk keep=b" then the output for that line would be This is [Greek: abgd] αβγδ If, in addition, a .gk command specifies ".gk pre=>> suf=<<" then the output would be This is [Greek: abgd] >>αβγδ<<
You may find these options useful when initially working with the .gk support, or even later when initially working on a new project. You could, for example, filter your source file using ppgen and the -f option, with a filter file containing:
.gk pre=>> suf=<< keep=b
and your transformed source file would then have the original Greek markup, plus a clear indication of the output that resulted from the transformation. You can examine each transformed letter and make sure it is what you wanted, and matches the source image. Any letters that remain transliterated rather than transformed will also be obvious and you can then figure out what .gk command you need to make the transformation work, or which accents you need to add to match the printed page, or you may be able to determine that the proofers made a mistake in the transliteration and correct it to work on the next run. You could then iterate that until you have handled all the Greek markup in the project, and move on to the next steps in your workflow.
Notes:
- pre= and suf= may also be useful if you want to provide language tagging for the Greek text in your project. For example, you could specify a .gk directive as ".gk pre=<lang=grc> suf=</lang>" and ppgen would surround the generated Greek with those language tags. They would be removed in the text output and used only in the HTML. (You could, of course, use any appropriate language value for the Greek, not just grc.)