About AE's new Greek language support.

(Use AE to view this file...)

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 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 optimum.  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 mneumonics 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 automaticly toggled
in a manner similar to the caps lock state.  Greek language is turned on
to the right of the (English) semi-colon, 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.  If you want to print Greek, you
have 2 choices.  1) You can write your own printer driver and/or download
an ELOT 928 font to your printer.  Use the character table below as a
guide.  2) You can load the file to be printed into (GASP!) Windows or
a Mac, or another machine that supports ELOT 928.  There are plenty of
ELOT 928 fonts and keyboard drivers for a variety of graphical platforms.

5) You need appropiate 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 automaticly turns
it off before it runs, and reverts to english-only mode.

The font used is an EGA compatable 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 preferance of the programmer.  The Greek characters are my
own implementation.  Most look pretty good, although the one I'm most
dis-satsified with is upper case Delta.

This font is cleared when AE exits.  I have included a support program,
FONT.COM that will allow you to view your files without using AE.  Like
all non-resident font programs, there are many things that will cause the
loaded font to be dumped in favor of the built-in font.  This is not
a problem while in AE itself, the font will stay active as long as you are in
AE; but if you run FONT.COM, then run your favorite file viewer, it may,
or may not come out in Greek!  There are better DOS-based Greek font programs
available if FONT.COM is in-sufficient.

5) 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.

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 constonant, nothing different happens and the constonant 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                  
C2          B                  
D8          C                  
C4          D                  
C5          E                  
D6          F                  
C3          G                  
C7          H                  
C9          I                  
CE          J                  
CA          K                  
CB          L                  
CC          M                  
CD          N                  
CF          O                  
D0          P                  
B0          Q                   
D1          R                  
D3          S                  
D4          T                  
C8          U                  
D9          V                  
D3          W                  
D7          X                  
D5          Y                  
C6          Z                  
           
Normal lower case
           
Hex       Keyboard Key      Greek Generated.
E1          a                  
E2          b                  
F8          c                  
E4          d                  
E5          e                  
F6          f                  
E3          g                  
E7          h                  
E9          i                  
EE          j                  
EA          k                  
EB          l                  
EC          m                  
ED          n                  
EF          o                   
F0          p                  
3B          q                  ;
F1          r                  
F3          s                  
F4          t                  
E8          u                  
F9          v                  
F2          w                  
F7          x                  
F5          y                  
E6          z                  
           
Accented upper case.  (Each keystroke preceded by the <;> key!)
           
Hex       Keyboard Key      Greek Generated.
A2          A                  
B8          E                  
B9          H                  
BA          I                  
BC          O                  
BF          V                  
BE          Y                  
           
Accented lower case.  (Each keystroke preceded by the <;> key!)
           
Hex       Keyboard Key      Greek Generated.
DC          a                  
DD          e                  
DE          h                  
DF          i                  
FC          o                  
FE          v                  
FD          y                  
