Scripsit Andy Dingley:
Yes, Greek is fun! But beware: not everything that looks like a Greek
letter is a Greek letter. For example, epsilon and delta as used in
calculus are Greek letters, but the n-ary summation symbol, though
historically based on capital sigma and looking much like it, is not a
Greek letter, or a letter at all, but a separate character, with a code
position of its own.
As they're hard to type on a qwerty keyboard, it's not easy to embed
them as characters.
Actually, it's relatively easy to type them. Install a Greek keyboard
layout, and the A key will produce alpha, the B key will produce beta,
etc., with some correspondences that aren't that intuitive but
learnable. On Windows, you can by default switch between different
keyboard layouts using Alt+Shift.
This would also require you to get the encodings right.
Surely. You would need to save the file in an appropriate encoding, like
utf-8, _and_ to make sure that the server sends a correct Content-Type
header.
A simpler solution, that's more readable than using numeric character
entities is to use HTML's pre-defined set of character entity
references.
That's certainly a simple approach and requires just a little care - the
names must be spelled correctly
Certainly DO NOT use MS Symbol to try and represent these characters.
Such tricks used to be popular in some circles, often advertized against
expert advice, and now they are firing back.
A construct like <font face="Symbol">a</font> means just the Latin
letter "a", with a suggestion to use the Symbol font, and since Symbol
contains no such character, the suggestion shall be ignored and another
font be used instead.
The shape of the glyphs is right, but Symbol works by taking the
English-Latin "B" character and mis-representing it as looking like a
Greek Beta.
(Well, for "B", you might not notice the difference. In all fonts that
contain the Latin B and the Greek capital beta, the glyphs are
identical. They're still by definition distinct characters. And you
might see a difference caused by font difference, just as Arial B looks
different from Times B.)
Early browsers tended to get this wrong, but even such browsers actually
display <font face="Symbol">a</font> as "a" when configured to ignore
font settings on web pages or to apply a user style sheet that enforces
a particular font.
That's just typographic transvestism. Don't do it on the web.
Or elsewhere. The Symbol font is best left unused. The glyphs in it
don't really match the glyphs of other fonts you're using, and commonly
available fonts contain much better presentation for Greek letters, for
example.
