LyX, LaTeX and Ancient Greek

I've used LyX for typesetting documents involving polytonic Ancient Greek. Once you learn how, it's fast, and the print quality is exceptional. It also helps ex-graphic-designers to stop worrying about layout, and focus on content: it knows what to do.

LyX contains the babel package and requires no additional changes to handle polytonic Greek out-of-the-box. However, I have never gotten its language support to handle circumflexes correctly in composite accents. The tilde is still interpreted as a non-breaking space, and couldn't be escaped in the Greek environment (and \shorthandoff{~} couldn't be used to redefine it). Accordingly, I did the following:

• Insert the following text into the preamble :

\usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
\languageattribute{greek}{polutoniko}
\shorthandoff{~}
\def\gr{\textgreek}

• This lets you use ERT (Ctrl-L), to enter betacode with the \gr{} function (this is an abbreviation of \textgreek{}).
• To stop the whole document appearing in Greek, add a 'Standard' line above the document title containing ERT with: \selectlanguage{english}

This works well, although the collapsible ERT boxes make the betacode a little less accessible when writing. Ultimately it was the difficulty I had getting glosses to work which made me switch to direct LaTeX, however.

As I said, I used LyX for this purpose. I've gotten brave enough to use LaTeX directly now, and it's much more powerful (especially with some Vim macros for automation). Once all my regular settings had been packed off into web-style header and footer includes, I found I had all the flexibilty and control I wanted, and relatively few of the potential headaches.

For glosses, I have a copy of cgloss4e.sty in my working directory, which has been modified to format gloss lines as I like them (directions are inside the file). I also have a copy of hanging.sty for the hangparas environment which I use for quick-n-easy bibliographies. These are available online.

I also keep a general-purpose header and footer, which gives me a compact 2-column-on-A4-landscape layout. Leave them in the same directory and:

\input{my_header}

and likewise for my_footer. Using input rather than include means it won't start a new page before or after the included files, should they contain any visible text. The file my_header.tex looks like:

\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

%% Page
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{a4paper,landscape,tmargin=2cm,bmargin=2cm,lmargin=2cm,rmargin=2cm}
\pagestyle{empty}

%% Language support
\usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
\languageattribute{greek}{polutoniko}
\shorthandoff{~}

\def\english{\selectlanguage{english}}
\def\gr{\textgreek}

\def\which{\rightarrow}
\def\means{\textit}
\def\parse{\small\textsf}

%% Packages
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{cgloss4e}
\usepackage{hanging}

\begin{document}
\english

\setlength{\columnsep}{0.75cm}
\setlength{\columnseprule}{0.4pt}
\begin{multicols}{2}

\end{multicols}
\end{document}

Glosses look like:

\gll \gr{dok~w d`e} \gr{k>ag`w pne~uma jeo~u >'eqein.} 
     \rm{And I think} \rm{I also have God's spirit.} 

Inline translations look like:

\gr{l'ogoc} $\which$ \means{word}

This puts an arrow from the accented Greek word to the English translation (a personal layout preference).