Consequences of Being Early and a Few: Unfinished Business for Greek Typography

This presentation summarizes chronic and fundamental problems with the support of Greek in digital environments for native users. These problems cover Unicode normalization and equivalence, the absence of Unicode codepoints, and egregious problems with keyboard access. The result is deeply problematic: missing characters that have Unicode codepoints, behind-the-scenes substitution of characters with Latin ones, inelegant substitution of fallback characters, and outright inability to access characters. This incorrect and partial rendering of Greek in social platforms and browsers leads to lacking support for the full range of Greek typography, and distortion of the language for new users, especially children who form ideas about their language via social media and online tools.

The presentation outlines the roots of the problems, which apply to other scripts as well, and updates on actions since the matter was publicly raised by the team. The presenters represent a core team of type professions and presenters, and a broad network of educators, translators, editors, journalists, and related language professionals within Greece and Cyprus.