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.

Currently, it only works with LaTeX and 8-bit TeX engines. Users of the XeTeX and LuaTeX engines are advised to use the polyglossia package instead.

News

2013-05-17
  • New maintainer.

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

Requirements

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.

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” or “polutonikogreek” options to babel:

\usepackage[greek]{babel}

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

Greek text fonts

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).