LyX ⇒ Greek final-sigma not capitalizing correctly

[ExecutorElassus]

For Lyx using fancy headers, using biblatex und xetex, a lower-case final sigma of a Greek word (within a German document, marked as polytonic Greek if that matters) is not being properly rendered as an upper-case Sigma character. To wit:


"Xxxxxxϛ" is shown as "XXXXXXϛ" in the header, as well as when applying the "Name" style (which is visually equivalent to small-caps). The non-final sigma ("σ") correctly renders to upper-case (ie, "Σ") in both headings and the "Name" style.

Is there a way to correct this behavior? Is it simply a bug with Lyx's rendering engine? With Xelatex?

Cheers,

EE

[scottkosty]

Is it simply a bug with Lyx's rendering engine?
EE

Hi EE,

There are a few bugs related to this I think:
http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/8040
http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/8509

Is yours one of those? If so, please add any details that are missing.

Thanks,

Scott

[ExecutorElassus]

hi scottkosty,

please excuse the very long delay in replying. I was in transit, and the forum doesn't notify me when I get replies.

Alas! no, those bugs are unrelated to this. The problem is that, when capitalizing internally, Lyx does not correctly convert \varsigma to \Sigma. It does actually create a character that looks like a capitol letter: like an upper-case C with a tail descending below the line. This is … interesting, but that's not how a final sigma capitalizes. It's supposed to capitalize to \Sigma, just like \sigma.

This is, incidentally, correctly handled with the long-s character (the ſ that people often falsely take to be an f in old-timey texts). If I set the NOUN attribute to the text "faſt" I get "FAST," which is correct. The same behavior does not occur with \varsigma.

Cheers, EE

[ExecutorElassus]

Well, this is just jacked up now.
I have two chapters, each in a different embedded Lyx file in my master document. In one, the document language is "German (old spelling)" and in the other, it's "German." In both I have a chapter title with a greek word with a final sigma (that is, the \varsigma character). In both cases, the Greek is the (polytonic) variant, though the first was previously (ancient).

The first one, as I said, does not convert to \Sigma in the fancy header. The second one, however, not only converts to \Sigma, but instead of "Kapitel" in front of the chapter number in the header, I have "ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ," which is the modern Greek term for "chapter." This is very bizarre behavior. Any ideas what's going on?
Cheers, EE

[scottkosty]

Strange. I'm not sure then. You could give LyX 2.1 beta 2 a shot:
ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-2.1/lyx-2.1.0beta2

But my guess is that won't help.

You should open a new bug report if yours is not yet reported.

[ExecutorElassus]

You are correct, I'm afraid: I'm already using the 2.1.0 build from 9 November.

I guess I'll go file a bug. I should file a couple, actually: Lyx also segfaults if I right-click a non-Latin-1 word (such as, say, a word in polytonic Greek) if I don't have its language already set to Greek.

[ExecutorElassus]

Whoa. I figured out what's going on.

The Greek character set has TWO different final sigmas, represented by the code points 0x03c2 and 0x03db. Both produce final sigmas, but they look slightly different: the former has a downward-pointing serif on its upper terminus, while the latter has a serif pointing upwards.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the latter is (it's in a region with a few other archaic Greek characters like Digamma and the Greek version of a Q), but it does not capitalize. The former, however (apparently the one I should have been using) DOES capitalize.

I was having trouble because they both look identical is the display font I'm using for Lyx. Maybe I should switch to Linux Libertine (which looks nicer anyways), so I can see the difference.

Exciting!

[scottkosty]

Good job figuring it out! And thanks for reporting back with the solution your found.