Insetring an ancient greek sentence into french (or Enghlish) text

[pierruel]

Good evening,
I have to introduce in a Scribus document the following "mixed" sentence:
C'est bien, persévère, μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου, comme le songe disait à Socrate.
or
It is good, persevere, μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου, as the dream said to Socrates.

Is it possible to introduce such a greek quote into a "latin" text ?
How should it be done ?
Thank you in advance.
Best regards
pierruel

[utnik]

hi pierruel

what exactly is your problem?
you may need a special character style for the greek part. otherwise it should just work...

utnik

[pierruel]

Hi utnik,
Sorry for the delay; I wasn't notified of an answer to my question. Thank you for answering.
I'm sorry I'm far from fluent in English neither writing nor reading.
I wrote on this forum the text I was willing to insert into Scribus using my latin, then greek keyboards, like this:
"C'est bien, persévère, μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου, comme le songe disait à Socrate."
but it doesn't work inside Scribus. The 23 greek letters are replaced by empty squares.
I suppose that I should download a greek typeface into Scribus but I have no idea, how it can be done. Could you explain ? Many thanks in advance.
pierruel

[utnik]

hi pierruel

yes. you need a greek font (or a font with greek characters...)
you may install the font in your standard font directory or just place it in the same directory as the .sla file is stored.

utnik

[pierruel]

Thank you utnik, but it is not as simple as it seems (to me at least).
I don't know what is my standard font directory: I trigged FreeCommander and found (probably) more than 200 folders called "Fonts". I checked 2 or 3 of them but these ones don't include the greek alphabet.
Neverthless when I switch my keyboard from French to Greek I can type greek text without any difficulty. So I'm sure that there is a greek font somewhere inside my computer (but if I import such a text into Scribus, the greek characters are replaced with squares as already said).
So if I want to duplicate a greek alphabet into Scribus Directory as you suggest, I'll have to open and study the contents of more than 200 fonts folders. I supposed than there is, inside Scribus, a functionality or a tool which is able to recognise in my computer the Font of Fonts folder(s) containing a greek font usable within Scribus but I didn't find it. Who can ? I'm surely not the first Scribus user needing to insert a greek quote into a French, English or German text, am I ? How could I ask one of the conceptors of Scribus ?
Thank you for any track.
Best regards
pierruel

[MrB]

I'm not sure where the issue is. What operating system are you using and what version of Scribus? I can copy your text into a text frame in 1.6.2.svn and 1.7.0.svn and its fine, with font set to Arial as an example.

[pierruel]

Hi!
I'm under Windows 11 Family with Scribus 1.4.8. I remember now that several of these mentioned Fonts folder were associated with GIMP and others with a video software. I can try and print the listing of the  FreeCommander output and look if one or more Fonts folder are associated with Scribus. I'll let you know.
Regards
pierruel

[MrB]

Just set Arial as the font for your text frame or text style, or one of the other standard Microsoft fonts should be ok. At least you will get the right results for now while you select a different font based on your preference.
Unless you have older documents to use, I strongly suggest installing Scribus 1.6.1. You can have both installed.

[pierruel]

Many thanks, MrB.
I'me very grateful that a member of the Scribus Team show interest for my modest issue. I'm not sure to understand clearly what you mean in your last post. At that stage I would like to say two points.
First, it's important to show the result I would like to obtain in Scribus (while it's easy to do with Office), i.e. the following sentence in French containing a Greek quote:

"C'est bien, persévère, μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου, comme le songe disait à Socrate."

2nd, I search again my PC with FreeCommander for the word Fonts and got an output of more than 4000 (4 thousands) lines among them I picked up 51 mentioning Scribus but I wasn't able to open any greek folder among them, I just noticed that greek is refered as "el" (for ellinika) to.
Among a series of .html files I found an article about adding a new font path to Scribus' fonts manager but I still don't know where I can find a greek font (in addition a number or files found by FreeCommander don't appear in my File Manager display).

I'll certainly install version 1.6.1 and make the test you suggest with Arial but in my Scribus document the greek quotation was inserted into a standard font usable in Microsoft documents and didn't appear in Scribus.  In the meantime an advice about finding the font folder containing greek characters would be strongly appreciated.
Sorry for my almost English writing !
Best regards
pierruel

[pierruel]

Hello everybody, in particular MrB
I couldn't be more sorry ! As my father used to say I was "using a hoist to lift a gram".
It was as simple as this:
1. Type the French (or English, German...) text into a text frame (in Arial for instance)
2. Click on amend (modify) the text
3. Switch your keyboard to EL (ellinika)
4. Insert (type) the greek quote at the correct place in the "latin" text.
Done ! It's perfect on the screen, perfect on the paper.
Many thanks to everybody who helped me.
Best regards
pierruel
P.S. Important addition: as MrB  wrote, the "containing" text must be in Arial or other standard Microsoft font. At the beginning mine was in Bodoni and I got just empty squares.

[utnik]

hi pierruel

...the "containing" text must be in Arial or other standard Microsoft font.

to be correct: there is no need for a microsoft font. but the used font should contain the greek glyphs. (as most of my standard fonts do...)

utnik

[Nermander]

At the beginning mine was in Bodoni and I got just empty squares.

That just means the Bodini font does not contain greek glyphs.

Many fonts are "incomplete" in the sense that they do not contain all glyphs from unicode.

I am not sure if there is an easy way to see how many glyphs are missing from a font...

Googling a bit I mostly found scripts for Indesign to check fonts, but this text can be used to at least check for some glyph sets
https://gist.github.com/seriema/642de9f05aea68e1b96b

Just copy into a text frame and try different fonts I guess.

[MrB]

I opened "Bodoni 72" which was already installed on my Mac.. The "Font Book" application on Mac shows the known supported languages. Greek is not one of them. Now, I must have received this font through Mac OS installation.. but I cannot say how it relates to the source of yours on Windows. Either way, it looks like neither contain Greek letters.

[pierruel]

Thanks and congratulations for all these rich comments (and rectifications). I learned much these days about typography (although I worked years in advertising prints).
Best regards
pierruel