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greekconverter

This English version of my German greekconverter page is provided for convenience of those who are interested in greekconverter but do not speak German. I apologize for my poor English.

What's up?

You can

• try the demo applet
• download the current version (101 KB)
• download the current source code (100 KB)
• read about the supported Encodings of Greek

Installation

Simply download the zip archive and extract it into a directory named greekconverter (make sure to match case, the directory name must be written entirely in lowercase characters).

History

greekconverter (when written in lowercase referring to the package) is still under development. But currently I do not have time for it.

Changes from 050306 to 060820:

• New conversion HTML - Unicode
• Additional list item for the message level in Nereus
• GreekFileConverter does no longer set the message level
• AsciiToBetacode made static

Changes from 040711 to 050306:

• Fixed two stupid errors, which prevented the execution of BibleworksToUnicode (in Nereus this conversion was not in the list box, in GreekFileConverter it was not built into the parameter check).

Changes from 040212 to 040711:

• New conversion BibleWorks - SPIonic/SGreek; currently simple and stupid (no support for kerning variants)

Changes from 020921 to 040212:

• BetacodeToUnicode rewritten: creates decomposed Unicode, is faster (uses lookup tables), supports many characters from the areas punctuation, brackets, text symbols and has a reasonable final sigma processing. The various quotation marks are not (yet) supported.

Changes from 0.7 to 020921:

• Erroneous conversion of lowercase Eta in UnicodeToBetacode fixed
• New conversion GreekKeysToUnicode
• Command line of GreekFileConverter changed
• Various input and output encodings can be chosen
• New GUI program Nereus (a silly name, but not as silly as GfCgui), a Swing app

Changes from 0.6 to 0.7:

• UnicodeToGreekKeys rewritten: should be notably faster now.
• New class BibleWorksToUnicode: converts (surprise!) BibleWorks into decomposed Unicode. Use of BibleWorksToBetacode is still possible but is dissuaded, because the class is no longer being maintained and will possibly be removed some day.

Changes from 0.5 to 0.6:

• UnicodeToBetacode completely rewritten: now very fast (converts the Greek NT in about 20 seconds), supports conversion of Latin1, Combining Diacritical Marks, Spacing Modifiers and General Punctuation where possible.
• UnicodeToHTML rewritten: faster and supporting all named entities from Spacing Modifiers and General Punctuation I know of.
• GreekFileConverter slightly altered: some code moved from conversion into initialization, thus reducing overhead.
• GfcGui improved and additional option choices for UnicodeToHtml added (see screenshot below).

Changes from 0.4 to 0.5:

• Some handling of canonical Unicode, i.e. procedures for decomposing (including Latin-1) and precomposing (first pass precomposing, does not handle vrachy/macron and recognition of iota used as iota subscript/adscript).
• Conversion Unicode to offical character names is speed optimized for large amounts of data (StringBuffer, lookup tables); now additionally supports Latin-1, combining diacritics, spacing modifier letters and general punctuation.
• Conversion Unicode into Betacode now supports brackets and other Betacode metacharacters.

To do for next versions:

• Rewrite and speed-optimize the other conversion classes.
• Add second pass precomposing, handling vrachy/macron and recognition of iota used as iota subscript/adscript.
• Unicode -> BibleWorks

Origins

greekconverter emerged from my (currently ceased) attempts to extend Bruce G. Robertson's DisplayGreek so that not not only Greek but also Latin, Coptic and Hebrew text could be displayed and mixed. For conversion of Betacode into GreekKeys DisplayGreek uses a class jag, which I could not find the source code for, so I could not extend it for Coptic. Hence I decided to write the necessary conversion classes myself. greekconverter was intended as the beginning.

GreekFileConverter

To convert entire files at one draught I wrote GreekFileConverter, a command line tool. To invoke it you must cd to the directory where the greekconverter subdirectory resides. It is invoked:
java greekconverter.GreekFileConverter srcfile destfile conversion [-inputenc value] [-outputenc value]

Consider the following Linux example (for DOS-users: the command ls is roughly equivalent to dir /w):

[/home/shaft/bin/java]$ ls -F
antigone.txt    greekconverter/
[/home/shaft/bin/java]$ java greekconverter.GreekFileConverter -?
GreekFileConverter srcfile destfile convmode [-inputenc value] [-outputenc value]
 srcfile     file name (and path) of the source text file
 destfile    file name (and path) of the output destination file
 convmode    Greek conversion mode
 -inputenc   encoding of srcfile, e.g. US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8
             default is the local charset
 -outputenc  encoding of destfile, like -inputenc
 Valid conversion modes are:
Unicode -> Betacode:    1002
Unicode -> ASCII:       1006
Unicode -> HTML:        1003
Unicode -> GreekKeys:   1004
Unicode -> Names:       1007
Betacode -> Unicode:    2001
HTML -> Unicode:        3001
ASCII -> Betacode:      6002
Bibleworks -> Unicode:  5001
Bibleworks -> Betacode: 5002
GreekKeys -> Unicode:   4001
Unicode -> Decomposed:  1011
Unicode -> Precomposed: 1021
[/home/shaft/bin/java]$ java greekconverter.GreekFileConverter antigone.txt antigone.html 1003 -inputenc UTF-8

Nereus

Nereus is a GUI interface for GreekFileConverter. To invoke it cd into the directory where the greekconverter subdirectory resides and type java greekconverter.Nereus.

Screenshot of the GUI interface Nereus

Disclaimer

Be aware that this is still a beta version. If you discover any errors or wrong conversions please drop me a mail. You may freely use this software, but at your own risk. I do not give any warranties of functioning and cannot be held responsible for any damages caused directly or indirectly by the use of these programs. If your CPU burns down while executing greekconverter code or you have a stroke out of anger do not say you have not been warned.

Author: Michael Neuhold (contact by e-mail)
Last change: Mar 24th 2017