Ancient Greek Language Support
for LibreOffice / OpenOffice

Sgreek Encoding

Sgreek is part of the "SilverFonts" shareware font package by Silver Mountain Software created, as far as I understand, for displaying Ancient Greek text. Text written in Sgreek is called Sgreek Encoded.

Simply put, the font is designed in a way to display Greek letters when Latin letters and punctuation marks are typed (much like the freeware SPIonic font). The difference from SPIonic is that it has way much more duplicate characters (these alternative forms of characters are rendered using different horizontal and/or vertical positioning regarding the base of characters), uses ASCII control characters to encode letters and it can use numbers 1-0, which SPIonic cannot.

Download Sgreek font ^

You will have to download the Sgreek font in case

• You want to be able to read Sgreek encoded text without converting it to Unicode
• You want to publish Sgreek encoded documents or web pages
• You want to be able to type in Greek / Ancient Greek without installing a special keyboard driver or layout

Sgreek font

Although the font is freely redistributable software, please keep in mind that it is shareware.

Quoting from the original download page (Silver Mountain Software - SilverFonts):
"Both basic Greek and Hebrew (Sgreek and Shebrew) fonts and our newer SGkClassic and RHebrew fonts are available as shareware! This means you can download the fonts for FREE and try them out. If you find them useful you can come back and register them".

AncientGreek Sgreek conversion Macros ^

I suggest saving your work before running either of these macros on a document (no text selection), so that reverting (Menu File / Reload) to it is possible, as Undoing may not be of much help, since a letter by letter substitution will take place resulting in way too many undo steps.

If any of these macros are executed without selecting any text, a warning message similar to the one shown in the following picture will appear.

Warning message on Windows 8.1

• SgreekToUnicode Macro

This macro converts text written in Sgreek to Unicode (normal text that can be edited in LibreOffice / OpenOffice).

• UnicodeToSgreek Macro

This macro converts text written in Unicode (normal text edited in LibreOffice / OpenOffice) to Sgreek.

Several characters will be converted to fullwidth/halfwidth characters before starting the actual conversion to Sgreek. These characters include "(", ")", "#", "%", "«", "»" etc. which are used by Sgreek to represent Ancient Greek letters. These characters will be converted to their original value when converting back to Unicode.

The following table shows the characters substitution that takes place when converting Unicode text to Sgreek. All substitute characters are fullwidth/halhwidth characters, unless otherwise noted.

* Non fullwidth/halhwidth character.

Sgreek also uses the first six characters of the first Unicode Private Use Area (Basic Multilingual Plane) to represent Ancient Greek letters. AncientGreek will convert these characters to "Sgreek coded content", but will not use them when converting "Sgreek coded content" back to Unicode.

Most of the accents and diacritics in Sgreek correspond to composite Unicode characters. For example, the Slash character (/ U+002F) corresponds to Combining Acute Accent (  ́ U+0301). AncientGreek will convert these characters to their precomposed equivalents. So, the Slash character (/ U+002F) will be converted to Greek Tonos (΄ U+0384), when converting "Sgreek coded content" to Unicode. This way, text produced by the converter will contain precomposed characters only (when applicable).

Using fullwidth characters ^

If the document (or selection) contains ASCII characters (English text), they will automatically be converted to the "fullwidth / halfwidth" characters, when text conversion from Unicode to sgreek is performed.

Sgreek implementation ^

AncientGreek fully implements the encoding as shown in the following table.

Note: In case multiple ASCII Characters can be used to represent an Ancient Greek character, the symbol displayed in bold magenta will be used when converting from Unicode to Sgreek.

Note: ASCII control characters are displayed using the terms defined at The Unicode Consortium Specification v. 7, followed by their Unicode code. More specifically, they are displayed:

• in bold red color, if the control character will be substituted by an equivalent character (or string), when converting to Unicode.
• in bold green color, if the control character will be used, when converting to Unicode.

Diacritics ^

• On lowercase letters these are keyed in the order: (1) letter, (2) breathing, (3) accent, (4) iota subscript, (5) breve/macron. E.g. w(=|
• On uppercase letters these are keyed in the order: (1) breathing, (2) accent, (3) letter, (4) iota subscript, (5) breve/macron. E.g. (=W|V