It's all greek to me...

[ffutures]

Kip Williams has kindly given me scans of D'Ordel's Pantechnicon, a lovely parody book about making magazines. I'm having a little trouble converting the motto of the book to HTML:



The foreign characters are accented Greek in some sort of script font to complicate things. Whatever, I can't find anything that looks much like some of them in the unicode etc. tables I've checked so far; anyone got any idea? Or feel like converting it for me?

Later: OK, so far after messing around with OCR etc. I've got `Ραδίως and the second character is wrong, so not a good start.

I'll post more as I get them, please let me know if there's anything that looks wrong

later still I think I'm going to admit defeat on this one and put it into the text as a graphic - I've tried it and it looks OK, it's just a shame that it won't be possible to paste it into a text document or whatever.

Sunday morning

Ρᾳδίως ἐγὼ διδάξω, κάν άμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν

Wim Lewis has posted the above, which takes care of most of it - anyone got any suggestions for the letters that still don't look right?

Comments

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

The transliterated Greek reads: Paidios ego didaxo, kan amousos ei to prin.

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

The translation is also rather ... loose. The Greek actually says something closer to "I will teach a boy (or slave, or even a child, by extension), even though he is uncultured before." The last phrase (kan amousos ei to prin) seems to be an allusion to Plato's Symposium, where Socrates says that Love can make all men poets no matter how "un-Muse-like" (a-mousos) they are before.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK... so at least it is Greek and not some sort of joke. All I need now is a way of converting it to HTML character entities.

[timill]

Raidios not Paidios. But you knew that...

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right. That's what happens when you're old and trying to work back and forth between two alphabets that share letters but not phonemes.

Not sure I know the word raidios.

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

Bah. Not only read a rho for a pi, but I missed a rough breathing mark: rhaidios -- easily. So, the translation is better than I'd originally thought. That's what I get trying to remember my Greek vocabulary without recourse to a dictionary.

[suewilson.livejournal.com]

Have your tries http://www.dafont.com/
there might be a font there that will do the trick.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to avoid anything that requires the user to download another font. What I've ended up doing is including a small version of the scan as well as the HTML version.