GreekStudy FAQ
The following are some frequently asked questions for the GreekStudy mailing list. You may also wish to consult the page on Unicode applications. Use the search box at the top of this page to look for additional information.
Why do I see trash instead of Greek in my email/browser/editor?
Consider the phrase “bad word”. In betacode it is written lo/goj ka/koj. In a Unicode font it is λόγος κάκος. If you can see Greek letters with accented vowels in that last sentence, you don't have any problems, at least with your browser.
If instead you see λόγος κάκος (a lot of accented capital I's mixed with numeric fractions) your browser is most likely using something like the ISO-8859-1 character set instead of Unicode. The fix is easy: go to your browser's View menu, select the menu item variously called Character Encoding, Encoding, or Text Encoding, and then choose Unicode or UTF-8. The procedure is similar for email programs that support Unicode (sadly, the popular Eudora email program does not support Unicode). In a word processor you should change the font to a Unicode font.
If you see square boxes where you should see accented Greek vowels, you are probably running into an issue with Internet Explorer. Less likely is the possibility that you're using a Unicode font that does not support polytonic (ancient) Greek. In that case, upgrade your font.
If you see a series of question marks, someone has cut and pasted Unicode text into an email reader or word processor that did not understand Unicode. There is nothing that you, as the recipient, can do in this situation, except educate the other party.