This document points to resources for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Greek script. The target audience includes developers of Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode, as well as implementers of web browsers, ebook readers, and other applications that need to render Greek text.
This document points to resources for Greek script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications about how to support languages written using the Greek script. The information here is developed in conjunction with a document that summarises gaps where the Web fails to adequately support the Greek script.
The editor's draft of this document is being developed in the GitHub repository European Language Enablement (eurlreq), with contributors from the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. It is published by the Internationalization Working Group. The end target for this document is a Working Group Note.
To make it easier to track comments, please raise separate issues or emails for each comment, and point to the section you are commenting on using a URL.
Some links on this page point to repositories or pages to which information will be added over time. Initially, the link may produce no results, but as issues, tests, etc. are created they will show up.
Links that have a gray color led to no content the last time this document was updated. They are still live, however, since relevant content could be added at any time. When the document is updated, links that now point to results will have their live colour restored.
This document was created by Richard Ishida.
See also the GitHub contributors list for the European Language Enablement project, and the discussions related to the Greek script.
This document points to resources for Greek script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These resources provide information for developers of Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications, and for application developers, about how to support languages written using the Greek script. They include requirements, tests, GitHub discussions, type samples, and more,
The document focuses on typographic layout issues. For a deeper understanding of the Greek script and how it works see Greek Orthography Notes, which includes topics such as: Phonology, Vowels, Consonants, and Numbers.
This document should be used alongside a separate document, Greek Gap Analysis, which describes gaps in language support for users of the Greek script, and prioritises and describes the impact of those gaps on the user.
Gap reports are brought to the attention of spec and browser implementers, and are tracked via the Gap Analysis Pipeline. (Filter for Greek script items)
The document Language enablement index points to this document and others, and provides a central location for developers and implementers to find information related to various scripts.
The W3C also has a repository with discussion threads related to the Greek script, including requests from developers to the user community for information about how scripts/languages work, and a notification system that tracks issues in W3C working groups related to the Greek script. See a list of unresolved questions for Greek experts. Each section below points to related discussions. See also the repository home page.
The Greek script is an alphabet, ie. a writing system in which both consonants and vowels are indicated.
Modern Greek comes in 2 flavours: monotonic and polytonic. Monotonic Greek generally uses only the tonos diacritic to show the location of emphasis in a word, although it may also use the dialytika occasionally to separate vowel sounds. Polytonic Greek attaches multiple diacritics more often.
Greek letters are in a sense encoded twice, since there is a sizeable set of atomic characters, but it is also always possible to write equivalent decomposed sequences. The visual forms of letters don't usually interact.
Greek text runs left-to-right in horizontal lines. Words are separated by spaces. The script is bicameral. The shapes of the upper and lowercase forms are typically the same.
Modern Greek has 17 basic consonant letters, plus a special lowercase, word-final form of the letter sigma.
The Modern Greek alphabet has 7 basic vowel letters, but they are combined to produce 8 digraphs representing additional sounds. They can also take tonos and/or dialytika diacritics, for which there are separate code points.
Standalone vowels are written using ordinary vowel letters and no special arrangements.Polytonic Greek can be found occasionally in modern texts, and that adds another 110 combinations of vowel plus diacritic to the repertoire.
Numbers use ASCII digits.
tbd