You see Greek capital accented characters when your text is lowercase?This is a typical
localization error. Many developers, when they want to quickly and easily convert to uppercase, they use the
text-transform css property, something like:
h2 {text-transform:uppercase;}Whereas this works fine with English text, it is not as amenable to Greek text. Why? Because Greek all caps must not have accents or other diacritics (with very few exceptions, like the Greek "or" which is "ή"), and this css property cannot accommodate that. For example you get something like:
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΊΑ ΓΡΆΜΜΑΤΑ ΜΕ ΤΌΝΟΥΣ
When the correct is:
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΑ ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΑ ΜΕ ΤΟΝΟΥΣ
And the actual source string is
κεφαλαία γράμματα με τόνους
By the way, this transformation from lowercase to uppercase Greek without accents usually works just fine in MS Word (select text, press Shift+F3).
Much to my chagrin I have even noticed such styles being used in DTP applications too. For example, this is the actual text:
Όταν είναι αναγκαίο να σταματήσει η κίνηση του πλαισίου αμέσως, πατήστε το κουμπί <:elf "HardwareControl" 1>Διακοπή έκτακτης ανάγκης<:/elf "HardwareControl">
Which produces the capitals in the output pdf with the style "HardwareControl" being the culprit.
The first 3 attachments illustrate an instance of this issue on a web site I translated. Note that in the actual view source, Greek is lowercase. Typical also with
SMF's default theme.
The remaining ones are an example from a DTP file with the text in TagEditor and the pdf document.
How to fix – three different ways1. In order to
avoid this issue, the translators should be provided with the text in the case it will have when it is displayed. I.e. if one wants
capitalized strings, then
provide capitalized strings to the translators from the outset, not lowercase ones which you capitalize by means of css. If you want both lowercase and uppercase for the same strings, then provide strings for both cases.
2. Open the html file and adapt the body tag (or any element that encases text) as shown below:
<body lang='el'>3. Remove the
text-transform:uppercase instances from css
See also:
text-transform - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDNStyling using language attributes