Greek in "Language" w/ InDesign character styles

[charles_e]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

We have to set a textbook -- called "midlevel" by the publisher -- for classical Greek.

It occurred to me if we use a character style for the Greek, one option under the advanced features is a language setting -- which I would suppose has some affect on hyphenation.

But classical Greek is perforce polytonic Greek, and I don't know if the InDesign Greek hyphenation dictionary is set up to include that. If so, it would at least cut down on the handwork...

Anyone know?

Thanks,

Charles

[DTY]

In InDesign CS5, for spell-check the dictionary only seems to know modern Greek with monotonic marking. However, it does parse the base characters correctly and produces hyphenation that seems sensible, so unless there's some difference in hyphenation behavior for modern Greek vs. classical Greek, it should work. Syllable structure works the same in both languages, so I don't anticipate any important difference in hyphenation.

[DTY]

I should add that the problem you will have is that the classical Greek vocabulary and word endings differ enough from modern Greek that a very large number of words will not be recognized by the dictionary; however, it seems to be able to make algorithmic hyphenation decisions on those anyway.