Greek, British Keyboard, English Desktop & Linux.

This small body of information, resulted from my attempt to do under linux something that windows has been able to do well for a very long time: Have an english-language desktop, with a british layout qwerty keyboard (my personal favourite) and being able to view and write greek (not polytonic). These instructions worked on my redhat 7.3 system (intel) running XFree86-4.2. Your milleage may vary in other configurations.

Step One: Login as root
Step Two: Add an entry for a British Keyboard with a Greek option.
Open with your favourite editor the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst. Under !layout, add gb+el British And Greek
```
!layout
gb+el       British And Greek
	      
```
Step Three: Use that entry in your XF86Config File
Here's the relevant section in my XF86Config-4 file (located in /etc):
```
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "keyboard"
        Option  "XkbRules"      "xfree86"
        Option  "XkbModel"      "pc105"
        Option "XkbLayout"  "gb+el"
        Option "XkbOptions" "grp:ctrl_shift_toggle"
EndSection
```
Notice the XkbLayout option and XkbOptions. This effectively uses my british keyboard with an option to switch to a greek keyboard using control+shift as a toggle.
Step Three: Set your environmental locale variables
On my system, those were located in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. Set them to:
```
                    LANG=en_UK
                    LC_CTYPE=el_GR
		    
```
Step Four: Install Greek Language Fonts
Redhat 7.3 provides greek language fonts on the following packages:
```
fonts-ISO8859-7-Type1-1.0-2
fonts-ISO8859-7-1.0-2
fonts-ISO8859-7-100dpi-1.0-2
fonts-ISO8859-7-75dpi-1.0-2
			    
```
You can also try the microsoft ttf font pack.
Step Five Gnome: Restart your xserver
- Step Five-A: Override the default theme font.
  Run gnomecc (the gnome control centre). Go to "Theme Selector". Select your favourite theme (Metal's mine :-), and click on "Use Custom Font". Select a greek font that looks good. I Use helvetica greek (-greek-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-7). Make sure you've selected the correct encoding. Click OK to save your changes.
- Step Five-B: Override the default gtkhtml (the gnome HTML viewer used by evolution, etc).
  Run gnomecc (the gnome control centre). Go to HTML viewer. Select greek fonts for both screen and displaying. I've selected grfixed(etl) (-etl-grfixed-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-7) for everything, which probably isn't a good choice, but works for me :-)
In applications such as mozilla, the terminal evolution etc, make sure your encoding is set to greek (iso8859-7), and use fonts that have greek encoding.
Greek in latex
You need to use the babel package. Here's an example document:
```
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{letter}
\frenchspacing
\usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
\usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc}
\selectlanguage{english}
Hello
\selectlanguage{greek}
Γειά
```
To parse it, you'll need the iso-8859-7.def encoding package, available here. As shown in the example above, use the \selectlanguage{} command to switch between languages.

Using these instructions, I can successfully write/read greek in almost all my X11 applications. It even works on Microsoft Office (running under crossover office). However, I cannot get it to work with xemacs properly (I'm running version 21.4). I'm having problems with the accents (i cannot input accented characters) and the encoding (- can anyone help me please?). However, it does work properly with emacs (i'm running version 21.2.1) if I turn MULE encoding to iso-8855-7. It also doesn't work in the TO, Subject, CC and BCC fields in ximian's evolution, as well as in ximian's contacts (again, if anyone can help, please contact me). Another problem is that I cannot seem to print Greek unless it's generated by latex (help, anyone? :-)

Hope this document helps. Thanks to (some of) the people at the linux-greek-users mailing list for their help.

Last modified: Thu Oct 10 21:35:06 BST 2002