Template talk:Greek alphabet sidebar

message: We need something other than iso-8859-1 for this page. How do we do that? Preferably UTF-8...
Joeljkp 15:23, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encoding 

message: I've separated out the obsolete letters, to avoid confusion. By the way on my browser the digamma and sampi show up only in upper case, and qoppa and san don't show up at all, even with the font specification. rossb 12:52, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obsolete letters 

message: Hello! I've added images, sans serif and serif, for all letters of the Greek alphabet. I'm unsure if this can – but should! :) – be incorporated into this table, but I thought it neat to clearly show visitors what each of these letters looked like, as each of the letters for the English alphabet (Latin alphabet) do. Thoughts? Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 18:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Greek alphabet]] letter images

message: Hello. I find the table hard to read; I want to read down the columns, but the table is ordered across the rows. I believe it is generally more common to order items in a table across if the table is wider than it is deep, and order items down if it is deeper than it is wide. Does anyone object to reordering the table so that beta is below alpha instead of beside it? Thanks for your comments. 64.48.193.172 19:14, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table ordering -- across or down? 

message: I don't know a lot about this subject, but I think that it's sure there should be an image from Stigma letter. Why it isn't in the template?
An image is available on the stigma page.
--Nethac DIU 12:09, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stigma image? 

message: Now you say that, I think same - maybe we should do a voting about this subject. If there's already a votation, please put a link to it here. --Nethac DIU 12:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I came here with the same thought - that this current version is clunky and difficult to read. Barring any objections, I'll be bold and rearrange it and see what works. Perhaps something similar to Template:AZ. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 22:01, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table ordering -- across of down? answer 

message: I made some small changes to the template - its shorter, but not wider, making it simply smaller. No content is changed, except that i added the "lower" case and "upper" case things at the top (to show which is which. The only reason I thought of doing this is that on the page for  Mu, the picture could confuse people slightly, because showing capitol Mu and lower mu next to eachother look like "M" and "u" (Mu). When I first saw that I thought it might have just been a title as in "this is the character Mu", but its actually showing the way the capitol and lowercase letters look
Here it is:
upper        lower            upper        lower	upper        lower            upper        lower	upper        lower            upper        lower
Greek alphabet                                                                                                                                                	Greek alphabet                                                                                                                                                	Greek alphabet
Α α Alpha                                                                                                                                                     	Β β Beta                                                                                                                                                      	Γ γ Gamma
Δ δ Delta                                                                                                                                                     	Ε ε Epsilon                                                                                                                                                   	Ζ ζ Zeta
Η η Eta                                                                                                                                                       	Θ θ Theta                                                                                                                                                     	Ι ι Iota
Κ κ Kappa                                                                                                                                                     	Λ λ Lambda                                                                                                                                                    	Μ μ Mu
Ν ν Nu                                                                                                                                                        	Ξ ξ Xi                                                                                                                                                        	Ο ο Omicron
Π π Pi                                                                                                                                                        	Ρ ρ Rho                                                                                                                                                       	Σ σ ς Sigma
Τ τ Tau                                                                                                                                                       	Υ υ Upsilon                                                                                                                                                   	Φ φ Phi
Χ χ Chi                                                                                                                                                       	Ψ ψ Psi                                                                                                                                                       	Ω ω Omega
obsolete letters                                                                                                                                              	obsolete letters                                                                                                                                              	obsolete letters
Digamma                                                                                                                                                       	San                                                                                                                                                           	Qoppa
Sampi                                                                                                                                                         	Stigma                                                                                                                                                        	Sho
Fresheneesz 22:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm just going to replace it till someone changes it back. Fresheneesz 12:10, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've restored the prior template: the revised one looks horrid, IMO, and takes up far too much space horizontally. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 15:46, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

text: On my browswer, it takes up no more space horizontally and is simply shorter. I don't know why it would be different on yours.Fresheneesz 02:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It takes up more space horizontally on my monitor (in more than just one resolution) because, in the revised version, the text is spread across three columns, not two. This might not be an issue if we were dealing with the English alphabet (for which letters are simply known, without names alongside), but alas ... E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 02:19, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thats interesting, because when I view it, the picture of the letters on top is thing that determines the tables width. Perhaps there would be a way to condense it so it worked on your system too? Fresheneesz 10:34, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed new template

message: Do we really need variant forms on the main table? Probably all of them have a variant form of two, only some of which are encoded in unicode. --Ptcamn 11:20, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I notice that the lunate sigmas break the layout, so we might want to remove one. But frankly, there is a reason why lunate sigma is encoded in Unicode (as opposed to being considered a font variant). We might consider dropping final sigma instead, which is really just an automatic word-final variant. I wouldn't know that any other Greek letters have true (named) variants. dab (ᛏ) 11:34, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

text: btw, there are in fact encoded variants, such as ϐ, ϑ, ϵ, ϰ, ϱ, ϕ which I wouldn't dream of adding here, precisely because they are just font variants which got their own codepoints merely because of their use as technical/scientific symbols. I am unsure about ϖ. dab (ᛏ) 11:39, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How's lunate sigma not a font variant? The article as it is, at least, doesn't describe any special usages. --Ptcamn 11:44, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Lunate sigma is on the verge of belonging to a different alphabet. Are Α and A font variants? "Greek alphabet" conventionally refers to both the Eastern and Western Greek alphabets. In principle, there would be nothing to stop us from cleanly disambiguating them as two different alphabets. I do not suggest that we do that of course, and I recognize this is a minor point. If you don't like it, I won't open an rfar about it :) dab (ᛏ) 11:54, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lunate sigma 

message: I saw this template and thought it really needed to read correctly as you go down the columns, rather than across each row. I saw here on the talk page that several people had made this same point before, but nothing had ever been done. So I did it.
I didn't change the "obsolete letters" section; if those should be changed too, that should be easy enough. —Bkell (talk) 20:49, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Columns instead of rows 

message: I've added another parameter to this template, 'image' — it lets one specify the image to be used, in case the default naming convention 'Greek alphabet .png' doesn't apply (such as in Psi, which now uses an svg graphic). ~ Booya Bazooka 02:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image parameter 

message: For some reason, the image for stigma doesn't show up. --WolFox (★Talk★) Contribs 16:39, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Stigma didn't appeared correctly in template. Thus I fixed this image appropiately by replacement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stigma_uc_lc.svg Now it displays correctly in template. Wikinger 19:03, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stigma image 

message: The letter San was not showing up properly in the table, either in Internet Explorer 7 or in Netscape 7.2. I've replaced it with an image, as used on the Greek version of this table. --rossb 12:27, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  San image 

message: I have removed image at top of box because all of the images are broken on the pages. Note: Most of the Greek Letter pages have the image shown in a separate frame. Thanks, Monkeyblue 02:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed image at top of box 

message: Stigma is not a "letter" -- it's a medieval ligature also used as a number in place of old digamma... AnonMoos (talk) 08:01, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Stigma

message: Heta redirects to Eta. It makes sense (I think), but having what appear to be separate links that both go to the same place isn't ideal. Voxii (talk) 16:44, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heta 

message: I realize that Future Perfect has been doing a lot of maintenance here--much appreciated!  In , however, I disagree with the substitution of images for some of the characters that depend on images.  In particular, it seems absurd that stigma and digamma, usually encountered in the real world in their lowercase forms, are here represented only by capitals.  I'd prefer to keep both, or, if there is some kind of space issue I don't understand, the lower-case letters only.  Wareh (talk) 16:25, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uppercase-only stigma & digamma 

message: About this  recent edit, inserting standard Unicode characters in place of the inline graphics we used previously for the archaic characters: while I can obviously see the motivation behind this change, are we really certain this will now be okay for our readers? The last time I looked (in 2011), there seemed to be still some massive problems about font coverage on common computer systems, making textual characters problematic:
# Archaic epigraphic "sampi" (U+0372, Ͳ), "heta" (U+0370, Ͱ) and "tsan" (U+0376, Ͷ) were only added to Unicode in 2008 and were not yet widely supported in 2011 except in some rare specialist fonts. Has this changed significantly by now? Moreover, in almost all fonts I've seen, "tsan" is significantly ugly (historically, it should not be a straight reverse N as usually shown, but slanted as in .)
# The two shapes of Koppa were still not reliably distinguished in widely available and popular Greek fonts. Even though the "epigraphic" set of codepoints has been officially around in Unicode since 2002, many fonts were still showing "epigraphic" (closed) glyphs at the codepoint(s) were the numeral (lightning-bolt-shaped) glyph should be.
# Lower-case "digamma" (ϝ) tends to be uɡly in many existing fonts. The glyph I'm seeing right now (with a long s-curved shape, similar to a crossed "∫") is very much not the kind of glyph that you'll find in older printed works, where something like  is much more likely. 
How reliably can we make readers see what we want them to see? Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:02, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd rather we've all of them in epigraphic form (images). Serif sampi, heta and tsan (reverse N) look hideous. — Lfdder (talk) 14:44, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you calling Arial and Times New Roman “specialist”?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ï¿½ (talk • contribs) 14:36, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Since when have those fonts had these characters, and what percentage of our readers' machines can we assume are by now properly equipped with them? Please see a few threads further up here, where one of our most regular editors in this topic area reported that he was seeing question marks on his computer, just two years ago. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:40, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Please see version history and distribution table of Arial font across various MS products here: . If I'm not quite mistaken, Windows XP shipped with versions of these fonts that still didn't have these characters. According to our Windows XP article, market share of Windows XP computers was still around 37% some time earlier this year. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:49, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Graphics versus Unicode chars, again 

message: I recently became aware of a problem arising out of the use of this template. It is a sidebar, so it's not displayed on mobile view. This shouldn't normally be an issue because sidebars only provide links to related topics, and so are not essential for understanding the article they appear on. The trouble is that in addition to links to related articles, this template does provide one essential bit of content – the image of the letter. So anyone who access articles on Greek letters on a mobile (that's about one out of two readers), will not be able to see how these letters look. We need to move the image out of this template and display it either on its own, or as part of a newly added instance of  (as is done for example at Q). – Uanfala (talk) 02:39, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for bringing this up. Personally, I'd be quite strongly opposed to using , which is one of the most ill-designed, most cluttered and least readable infoboxes I've encountered (at least the way it's been implemented for the Latin letters, Q being an illustrative example of how utterly horrible it is). I wouldn't mind moving the image to just an old-fashioned standalone image above the box. Or could we just redefine the box formatting to use the "infobox" rather than the "sidebar" class, so it would simply behave like an infobox? Finally, I'm not sure if the image as such is really such an "essential bit of content" – all of the articles naturally contain the character in question right at the beginning of the lead sentence, where it should be accessible to all readers, just not quite as large as in the image. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:58, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sidebar or infobox 

message: The discussions above on graphics vs Unicode are about 10 years old; at this point I expect every significant browser / OS pair to have support for archaic Greek letters, so I think we should make the change. 
I've made a copy of the template with Unicode letters so people can preview the change. MattF (talk) 17:12, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I've made the chanɡe, for now, thouɡh I'm still a bit skeptical whether this is going to get correct output for all readers. Unfortunately there's probably no way of knowing, unless people complain. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:25, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you! MattF (talk) 02:46, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Graphics vs Unicode, episode 3 (November 2021) 

message: ϛ 
+ 2604:3D09:1482:200:9947:A1C1:D878:E79D (talk) 09:59, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 25 January 2023 - fix Greek Stigma incorrectly labelled as Digamma 

message: The link to the archaic letter Digamma goes to the wrong place. It goes to San when it should go to here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CD%B6 38.59.172.79 (talk) 16:34, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: , added link to the Pamphylian digamma on Wikipedia instead, as no other letters link to Wiktionary. I will not remove the existing link to , as it states:  Let me know if you would like this to be changed further. TGHL ↗ 🍁 22:28, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 31 December 2023