About AE's new Greek language support. (Use AE to view this file...) If you use AE in a Windows environment, please read "Using AE with Windows" in the main documentation file AE.DOC. I have added direct support for the Greek language to AE. I did this to help support my studies of the Greek language (therefore, no documentation in Greek this time, maybe next, sorry.). There is only one option with regard to Greek (other than on/off), and that is the shape of upper case omega. The default is "traditional" two piece omega, the configurator allows a switch to a "modern" one piece instead, if desired. Do note that the omega shape only affects the shape as displayed on the screen, NOT the shape printed on your printer (which is probably one piece). Ditto for loading files back and forth between AE and another ELOT 928 program, the other program will shape omega according to its own font. There are several things you need to know before using AE to write Greek, either as a normal text editor, or in an assembly language setting. 1) AE attempts to support the ELOT 928 Greek character font standard, as found on the Internet. There are a couple of other Greek character mappings "out there" but the best I can tell ELOT 928 is the up-and-coming standard. I use the phrase "attempts to support", as I'm not sure I have the complete font. I had to reverse engineer the font in order to get all the Greek characters, this seems to work well, but other greater-than-128 characters that have nothing to do with Greek may be missing, different, destroyed, or otherwise not the same as ELOT 928. For our purposes, it probably doesn't matter, but if someone thinks otherwise, please contact me. 2) The keyboard driver may be less than optimal. I have, to the best of my ability, emulated the "WINGreek" keyboard driver (Detailed in the table below). The only deviations from this are the toggle (AE uses ^F1, WINGreek uses CTRL-ALT-SPACE), and the implementation of the Greek questionmark (;), and the Greek semicolon (°). Not only does AE produce the Greek questionmark when the 'Q' key is pressed (as in WINGreek), but it will also substitute the Greek questionmark when the "regular" questionmark (?) is pressed. 3) The assumption is, if using Greek in assembly language, that the Greek will be used primarily for commenting. I have made the assumption that there are no assemblers that can eat mnemonics in Greek, although some may be OK with Greek labels. Therefore, when AE is in it's normal assembly language editing mode, the language is automatically toggled in a manner similar to the caps lock state. Greek language is turned on to the right of the (English) semi-colon (or whatever the "comment character" has been configured to), and off to the left. ^F1 may be used to toggle back to the other state. 4) Printing is a problem. Most printers don't understand ELOT 928, and there are far too many printers out there for me to even think about writing printer drivers for them all. However, AE now includes an optional printer driver (turned on when configuring the program) to allow printing ELOT 928 to most HP LaserJets. See below. 5) You need appropriate hardware. Mono, CGA, and Hercules users are left in the cold here. You need at least an EGA display. EGA-mono and VGA-mono are fine. If your hardware cannot support Greek, AE automatically turns it off before it runs, and reverts to Latin character mode. The font used is an EGA compatible font, it may look slightly odd on a VGA system. You will notice that many of the "normal" characters have a different appearance than the normal IBM-PC characters. This is from personal preference of the programmer. The Greek characters are my own implementation. Most look pretty good, although the one I'm most dis-satisfied with is upper case Delta. 6) Find and Search and Replace act differently. You can use these as normal, except AE will *not* ask about case sensitivity if it thinks Greek is present in the search string. If Greek is present in the search string, the search is *always* case sensitive. This is largely due to technical problems in dealing with various permutations of case, accents, the oddball structure of the ELOT 928 font; the necessary code would be a plate of spaghetti. It *is* possible to enter a Latin-character search string, and a Greek replacement string in search and replace (^QA). Since AE is searching on the Latin string, the search can be case in-sensitive. The Keyboard Driver: The keyboard driver is simple to use. Pressing ^F1 will toggle between Latin and Greek character sets. This discussion relates to behavior of the keyboard when in Greek mode. AE makes a rudimentary check of the target file (if any) when the program is first started. If the first non-white space character is Greek, it will automatically select Greek mode, otherwise it starts in Latin character mode. This isn't perfect, if the first non-white space character happens to be a punctuation symbol, it will assume Latin mode. Then there's the question of what to do with a mixed language document. I usually put 'ÅëëçíéêÜ' (without quotes) at the top of my mixed language files... Either the 'q' (lower case) key or the '?' key will generate a Greek questionmark (;) As this character is a Latin semi-colon, the keyboard's semi-colon key is reserved for toggling accents. If you press the keyboard's semi-colon key (;), nothing will be displayed. However, *if* the next keystroke is a vowel, it will be an accented vowel. If the next key is a consonant, nothing different happens and the consonant is stored as usual. The Greek semi-colon (°) has been a bit of a headache. Apparently there is no standard keystroke to generate this character. I have it mapped to upper case 'Q'. If anyone has any better ideas, I'd appreciate knowing about them! Otherwise, the keyboard is mapped as follows: (Hex displayed for informational purposes. You may use this information to write a printer filter or a printer font loader.) Normal upper case Hex Keyboard Key Greek Generated. C1 A Á C2 B  D8 C Ø C4 D Ä C5 E Å D6 F Ö C3 G à C7 H Ç C9 I É CE J Î CA K Ê CB L Ë CC M Ì CD N Í CF O Ï D0 P Ð B0 Q ° D1 R Ñ D3 S Ó D4 T Ô C8 U È D9 V Ù D3 W Ó D7 X × D5 Y Õ C6 Z Æ Normal lower case Hex Keyboard Key Greek Generated. E1 a á E2 b â F8 c ø E4 d ä E5 e å F6 f ö E3 g ã E7 h ç E9 i é EE j î EA k ê EB l ë EC m ì ED n í EF o ï F0 p ð 3B q ; F1 r ñ F3 s ó F4 t ô E8 u è F9 v ù F2 w ò F7 x ÷ F5 y õ E6 z æ Accented upper case. (Each keystroke preceded by the <;> key!) Hex Keyboard Key Greek Generated. A2 A ¢ B8 E ¸ B9 H ¹ BA I º BC O ¼ BF V ¿ BE Y ¾ Accented lower case. (Each keystroke preceded by the <;> key!) Hex Keyboard Key Greek Generated. DC a Ü DD e Ý DE h Þ DF i ß FC o ü FE v þ FD y ý Using the HP printer driver: AE now includes an optional printer driver that allows printing ELOT 928 to most HP LaserJets. It may or may not work with your HP printer, and it may or may not work with a non-HP printer. It is useful ONLY for printing Greek, if Greek isn't configured, the printer driver is automatically disabled by the program. It seems to work with every LaserJet I've been able to throw it at, but there are no guarantees! There are two caveats: A) The Greek font the HP LaserJets have built into them is a proportional font. I DO NOT share the current love affair with proportional fonts. I don't see the point, and proportional fonts screw up any kind of text formatting that may be present in the document. For "normal" use, i.e. a Greek text document, or an assembly language file with Greek comments, this is transparent. Where proportional fonts get you in trouble is when you make tables. I have, for instance, several tables with verb conjugations, noun conjugations, etc. that I use in my studies. The columns don't line up when printing. Sigh.... B) Printed upper case accented characters are not exactly pretty. There is little I can do about this, but as upper case accented characters are not normally used in modern Greek, it shouldn't be a huge problem. ELOT 928 supports them, so they are there, and recognizable, but not pretty. The printer driver also has a "feature" that turns it off when changing printers with the ^KN command. If you use the HP driver, you MUST configure the LPT # of the HP printer to be the default printer (Using the setup program). When you change the LPT # with the ^KN command, the HP driver is turned off. The HP driver is turned back on when the ^KN command changes back to whatever the default was configured to be. This is so the program can print to a non-HP printer on a different port without having the HP driver in the way. If you have compatible HP printers on more than one port (and need to print Greek to both), or you just can't live with having the HP as the configured default; this "feature" will be a problem. If it is, contact me and I'll "do something" about it. I'm going to leave it this way unless I hear from someone that is having a problem with it...