Greek translation

[kokkonisd]

Hello!
I'd love to contribute by adding a Greek translation :)
I've read the contributing guide and the special guidelines for translators; I'll start working on a fork.

[josephwright]

Excellent. Do you plan to cover 'classical' (pdfTeX) working or just go with Unicode engines?

[kokkonisd]

I was planning on going with pdfTeX, as I am more familiar with it.

[nplatis]

As far as I can see, the fork by @kokkonisd has not progressed. I created a new fork https://github.com/nplatis/learnlatex.github.io and started working on it. Hopefully I will manage to complete the translation eventually.

Feel free to contact me about the translation!

[kokkonisd]

@nplatis sorry, I haven't had the time to work on this. Thanks for picking up the slack :)

[davidcarlisle]

@nplatis thanks for this. If you want to proof read your translation you may enable github pages on your fork, but please remove
https://github.com/nplatis/learnlatex.github.io/blob/main/CNAME
as otherwise your fork will "steal" the learnlatex.org domain name. (which is an annoying detail but can't be avoided due to the way gh-pages manages domain names)

[davidcarlisle]

@nplatis see https://github.com/learnlatex/learnlatex.github.io/blob/main/TRANSLATIONS.md

[josephwright]

Also, if possible can you got for a LuaTeX-based workflow rather than pointing to LGR, etc.? We are aiming over time to move that way, and for non-Latin script languages, the 'start with pdfTeX' approach isn't great.

[nplatis]

@nplatis thanks for this. If you want to proof read your translation you may enable github pages on your fork, but please remove https://github.com/nplatis/learnlatex.github.io/blob/main/CNAME as otherwise your fork will "steal" the learnlatex.org domain name. (which is an annoying detail but can't be avoided due to the way gh-pages manages domain names)

So far I am working locally with jekyll to preview the site. BTW, it would probably be nice to provide instructions for this as it much faster (and cleaner) to preview pages locally -- I could do it if you want.

If (or when) I publish the site, I will be careful to remove the CNAME file!

[davidcarlisle]

@nplatis Ah OK thanks yes, we don't tell people to install Jekyll as we wanted to offer a "no software needed" path to volunteering to contribute:-) But as you say, it does allow local preview without having to cycle through a public fork.
A PR to the translators (or contributors) guide documenting that as an alternative would be welcome (separate from any PR for Greek)

On luatex, you could (at least for some pages) offer both, eg if you start from

https://www.learnlatex.org/en/help#running-the-examples

then you could show both

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[LGR]{fontenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}

\begin{document}
Παράδειγμα κειμένου.
\end{document}

and

% !TeX lualatex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontsetup}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}

\begin{document}
Παράδειγμα κειμένου.
\end{document}

(Blame Google if my Greek is bad:-)

The latter will use New Computer Modern opentype font (I also tried TeX Gyre termes Times clone, but that was missing the accented ά That example works at both texlive.net and Overleaf)

[josephwright]

@nplatis Thanks for taking this up - we are really getting good coverage now of non-Latin scripts :)

[nplatis]

Regarding Greek: Following the path of the lessons, I was thinking of using exactly the same examples (in English, with pdflatex). I have not gone through all the lessons in detail, though.

My first thought was to create two pages on writing Greek, one for pdflatex (which I do not use for Greek texts, so I would have to do some research -- mainly for "legacy" use) and one for the Unicode engines, mainly lualatex (which I currently use and as far as I can see is destined to be the default). But, since this site is positioned as a resource for beginners (and not as a reference site) I will concentrate on lualatex.

The next question would be which package to prefer among babel, polyglossia or xgreek. I would go for babel since it seems more "standard". But I would think about a short comparison between them.

Of course, some (or all of) these extra topics could fit in the corresponding more- lesson.

I will come back to this when I reach the point of writing about Greek. Any thoughts are welcome :)

[Skillmon]

@nplatis our core goal was to show a minimal set of best practices to get new users started. So in the main lessons I'd definitely focus on those (LuaLaTeX + babel).

[josephwright]

Indeed: also the core drivers for the site are the LaTeX team and friends, so babel is the recommended way to go.

[davidcarlisle]

@nplatis

I was thinking of using exactly the same examples (in English, with pdflatex).

OK, as you may have seen, most of the translations have translated examples, Lithuanian has used English (as the translator thought most users would be writing English language papers, even if they would benefit from translated instructions). Obviously if the examples are in English the earlier comments re setting up babel and luatex are less important.

There is some flexibility but in general apart from mentioning specific language packages needed to get going its good to keep to essentially a translation rather than too much extra material. So the site as a whole is a single course with multiple languages not multiple courses.

You can however have any number of Greek-specific lessons at the end (and add links to them from earlier lessons where that make sense)

https://www.learnlatex.org/gr/language-01 ... https://www.learnlatex.org/gr/language-05 or whatever

I haven't checked it for a while but the language-switcher is supposed to cope with extra lessons there so if you are on language-03 and switch to english you don't get a 404 error, it should switch to the english table of contents.

But especially for the runnable examples, you could have English or Greek or have both whatever works best. but for Greek examples concentrating on lualatex+babel sounds good, thanks.

David