7

I tried to make a greek text in Latex. But there is a small problem the sign of question ";" shows as upper dot.

\documentclass[twoside,a5paper,12pt]{book}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\usepackage{epigraph}
\usepackage[a5paper]{geometry}
\sloppy

\begin{document}

--- Καλά αν είναι έτσι! Αλλά θα λειτουργεί;
Τι θα κάνουμε, απλά θα καθίσουμε απ’ έξω,
θα βγάλουμε φωτογραφίες και αυτό ήτανε;
Δεν θα ανάψουμε ούτε ένα κεράκι;

\end{document}

Result

I tried \usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc} and got more problem with encoding. After I tried \usepackage{ucs} but result was the same. Could somebody help me? Thank you in advance.

filokalos
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    Use ? for the question mark. The reasons for having ; print the Greek semicolon (upper dot) are historical and due to how Greek had to be input, before UTF-8, via a transliteration map: the punctuation marks are Latin and the printed ones are their Greek counterparts. – egreg Oct 25 '13 at 12:25
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    filokalos, see also @egreg's answer, he posted an alternative solution (in case you haven't seen it). – Alenanno Oct 25 '13 at 12:48
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    You may also use xelatex. – pmav99 Oct 25 '13 at 21:58

2 Answers2

11

The “official” answer is “Use ? for the question mark”.

The reasons for having ; print the Greek semicolon (upper dot) are historical and due to how Greek had to be input, before UTF-8, via a transliteration map: the punctuation marks are Latin and the printed ones are their Greek counterparts.

If you have a recent and up-to-date TeX distribution (with babel version 3.9), you can define ; as a shorthand for the question mark:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}[2013/10/10]

\useshorthands{;}
\defineshorthand{;}{?}

\begin{document}

--- Καλά αν είναι έτσι! Αλλά θα λειτουργεί;
Τι θα κάνουμε, απλά θα καθίσουμε απ’ έξω,
θα βγάλουμε φωτογραφίες και αυτό ήτανε;
Δεν θα ανάψουμε ούτε ένα κεράκι;

\end{document}

Note that utf8 is preferable to utf8x with the newer TeX distributions.

enter image description here

egreg
  • 1,121,712
7

If you take a look at this document about the Greek option for the babel package, this is a "feature", i.e. it's not a bug. There is a table that illustrates what you need to type in order to have a certain output (see page 2 of the document):

enter image description here

Werner
  • 603,163
Alenanno
  • 37,338