For those curious, here are some relevant technical details about how Aoidoi.org works. Some details are subject to change without notice, but the outline should always be correct.

The core is running on an Apache+PHP web server, running RH Linux. We try to keep Apache and PHP pretty up to date. The current version of Aoidoi.org (March 2006 and after) no longer uses PHP, but instead relies on simple server-side includes for consistent sidebar information.

All text has been edited in Emacs. My own programming is in Python and increasingly often Common Lisp, especially the SBCL implementation.

The Vexed Font Problem

This site now uses Unicode.

Representing polytonic Greek via web pages is a truly astounding problem. Each operating system has its own way of dealing with fonts in general, and each of the many possible browsers also has to be separately configured to cope — or fail to cope — with classical Greek. The first version of the site used a very complex pipeline to produce images of every single Greek word that appeared on the site. Enough people have Unicode now that I have replaced that brittle system.

So long as you have a Unicode font installed Aoidoi.org should be readable, though it was designed with the free Gentium font in mind.

The PDF commentaries have embedded fonts, so those will work for everyone regardless of what fonts they have installed.

The web pages use basic CSS, which includes print media settings more appropriate for printing.

As of August 2007, all new texts PDFs are produced using XeTeX, which allows me to use Unicode within the LaTeX source. As an added benefit, it also makes it much easier to use any OpenType or TrueType font. I now use Gentium in the PDFs, too, for main body work, and the beautiful GFS Neohellenic from the Greek Font Society.