Greek alphabet and math symbols

**fbsadler** · 01-18-2004 11:36 AM

Summary:
Is it possible to display web pages containing greek letters and math symbols using ISilo? If so, please explain how to accomplish this.

Details:
I have created a number of web pages containing math/physics reference information. These pages display a number of characters that are not in Windows-1252: pi, the integral sign, and the infinity symbol for example. To display these characters in my web pages, I use HTML named character entities such as "π", "∫", and "∞".

What do I need to do for these pages to be displayed properly on my PDA using ISilo? Is there some combination of encodings / fonts that will accompish this? FYI, most of the extra characters I need are included in the Symbol Font on Windows.

Any help would be appreciated.

***iSilo*** · 01-18-2004 01:15 PM

Unfortunately it is not possible to display math and greek symbols on a Palm OS device. On other platforms that have support for Unicode, this might be possible though.

**fbsadler** · 01-21-2004 06:04 AM

Originally Posted by iSilo

Unfortunately it is not possible to display math and greek symbols on a Palm OS device. On other platforms that have support for Unicode, this might be possible though.

Is it possible to display math and greek symbols on another PDA operating system? If so, would ISilo also be able to do this on that platfom? Which one(s)?

I wasn't aware that another PDA operating system supported Unicode.

***iSilo*** · 01-21-2004 08:37 AM

Theoretically, all platforms on which iSilo runs have support for Unicode, including Palm OS, but there are several factors involved in determining the completeness of this support with regard to the ability to display Unicode encoded text:

Does the device have the requisite fonts to display the character glyphs at issue (e.g., in your case, the Greek/math symbols)?
Does the device have the requisite transcoding data for mapping from Unicode encoding to the encoding used by the fonts?

Most devices probably do not have the above requisites. On Palm OS devices, you would probably need to have some specialized software at the system level to make it possible. On Pocket PC devices, it might be as simple as installing a font with Greek/math symbols, to add this support. You would really need to have a document with all the characters you want to display and view the document on a specific device to see what it supports specifically.

**fbsadler** · 02-09-2004 04:55 AM

After many days of fiddling, I've finally succeeded in creating an iSilo document that displays math symbols and greek letters along with ordinary text. Now I can create a single HTML document containing math / physics notes *and* display this document on both Windows XP and my PDA (Palm OS).

For those who are interested, here's how I did it. Please note that it's kind of a hack and the HTML required to accomplish it "aint pretty". But it does work (at least in my environment) and the presentation does looks pretty nice.

1) Install FontBucket and use it to create the Windows "Symbol" font on the
PDA. iSiloX does not seem to support the Symbol font, but FontBucket does.

2) Create an HTML document with the following BODY tag attribute:

<BODY style="font-family:san-serif">
...the HTML for your document body goes here...
</BODY>

This sets "sans-serif" as the default generic font for the whole document. (I think this is already the default for HTML bodies, but I like to make it explicit.)

3) Fill up the body of your document with any textual information you like.

4) When you want to add Symbol font characters (math symbols or greek letters) to the body of the document, first determine the numerical character code of the character. You can do this with the Character Map utility in Windows.

Display the Symbol font, click on the character, and Character Map will tell you the hex character code. For example, the character code for small pi is
"0x70" (decimal 112) and for the square root sign is "0xD6" or (decimal 214).

5) Use the following HTML tag to display that Symbol font character:


...symbol font character code(s)...


Here are some examples of various ways to display greek pi and the square root:

p 
p 
p 
Ö 
Ö 

This HTML tag does a font switch and displays the enclosed character cod(s) in the named font. "Symbol,serif" says first try to display the character in a font named "Symbol" and then if that doesn't work, try using the generic font named "serif". On windows, the Symbol font is used to display the character.

6) Use iSiloX to move the document to your PDA.

7) Finally, open the document with iSilo and open the "Font Options" dialog (Tap "Options" then tap "Font"). For the "Sans Serif" font family, select any normal font of your choosing. (I usually choose "Device font".) For "Serif" font family, choose "{fb}Symbol:FontBucketDB". This tells iSilo to use the FontBucket font named "Symbol" (which you created in step 1) when displaying characters from the serif family.

The document now displays both normal text and math/greek characters in iSilo.

Enjoy.

**bob** · 02-21-2004 04:29 PM

In my attempts to display the symbols ↑↓→←♀♂, Greek letters and other medical characters on web pages and iSilo, I found another way of displaying Greek symbols, which should work for most other languages.

FIRST – set up your Web Page
For Greek to show up, insert this into your web page after your html tag-

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=Windows-1253">

This sets your character set to Greek.

Here are some others-
Windows-1250 (Central Europe)
Windows-1251 (Cyrillic)
Windows-1252 (Latin I)
Windows-1253 (Greek)
Windows-1254 (Turkish)
Windows-1255 (Hebrew)
Windows-1256 (Arabic)
Windows-1257 (Baltic)
Windows-1258 (Vietnam)
Windows-874 (Thai)

And here’s a link if you want to view what’s on them - http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/wincp.mspx

UTF-8 works great for iSilo Windows but not iSilo Palm

*Note- when writing your web page you must use the Unicode characters for them to display on iSilo. i.e. – Symbol Fonts won’t work; only use the Characters under Times New Roman, Arial, ect.

Save
Convert
Install

SECOND- set up your font
For iSilo Windows users-
You should be all set, just select a font such as Times New Roman or Arial.

For iSilo Palm folks-
Use Font Bucket to make a new font.
Click add Font
Select a font that allows you to select the language you want to use under the Script box.
Select a font size.
Select a script (Greek) and your font should be displayed in the Sample section.
Click OK
Give your new font a name and unselect the High-density box if you want to view your font with the iSilo smallest font option on a Hi-res PDA.
Click OK
Save
Install.

THIRD- set up your palm.
Go to Font under Options and set your Default to your new font.
You’re done.

Not too bad.
Unfortunately, converting all my special characters to Greek means I lose some of the default symbols I use.
Now if you can figure out a way to make a custom character code that will allow me to display ↑↓→←♀♂ and other characters on a web page and on iSilo, or get iSiloX to do something similar, please let me know. I’ll be more than happy to create a new font set if I can just find a way to make a custom Character set for web browsers.

The Windows Character Map program shows most of the Asian languages as having Greek, arrows and the other symbols I would like to use, but I haven’t found a way to use that yet.

I’ve already tried replacing certain characters with images, but they don’t resize on the Palm and look like crap when you print them.

I could make a custom font with a font editor and redo all the special characters on a iSilo only version of the web page, or even embed the new font on the web page. That would take a lot work for a huge database that is constantly being modified and the embedded font option just has problems.

Good Luck and thanks fbsadler for pointing me in the “right” direction.

**herryjohn** · 09-07-2008 09:39 PM

do it better

**Juanita99** · 08-24-2009 11:57 PM

Originally Posted by herryjohn

do it better

Very cool news! I’ll take a look at it and see about adding it here.

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**josaphlewis** · 07-01-2010 02:41 AM

I think, it’s not possible to display math and greek symbols on a Palm OS device. Does the device have the necessary transcoding data. On additional platforms that have support for unicode, this might be potential though.

Thread: Greek alphabet and math symbols

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Greek alphabet and math symbols

Unfortunately not possible

"other platforms"?

It depends on a couple of factors

Where there's a will, there's a way.

How to Display characters in Different Languages

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