Foreign languages

As a result of our academic background, we pay special attention to processing foreign languages. At first, we focused primarily on ancient Greek, but now we also work extensively with Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic and transliterations of these languages. We have adjusted our conversion system so that we don't have any special requirements for submitting copies with non-Latin fonts. We can process TrueType-, PostScript- and OpenType-fonts, both for Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Non-Latin scripts

Many typesetters encounter difficulties when processing foreign languages, since there are many different encodings of non-Latin fonts. Unicode fonts (OpenType) have been designed to solve this problem. These fonts, however, are only used on a small scale. We have developed software that enables a problem free exchange of non-Latin fonts. Using a conversion table we can convert any Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Syriac, Armenian, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean font to our encodings. If you encounter compatibility problems with fonts, you can profit from this software: we convert Greek, Hebrew or Arabic to the desired font and return it to you as a Word file. Read more about this in the section about font conversion.

Right-to-left scripts

Right-to-left scripts like Hebrew and Arabic make specific demands on the typesetting system. This is specifically the case when right-to-left occurs in a left-to-right context, since in these cases the line hyphenation is based on complex rules. For processing bi-directional texts we use an extension of TeX: the excellent TeX—XeT implementation of ε-TeX.

Transliterations

Many languages use diacritical marks to indicate differences in pronunciation. In Dutch, only four of these symbols are used: the diaeresis (¨), the grave (`), the acute (´) and the circumflexus (ˆ). Other languages use more diacritical marks though, like the macron, breve, caron and ogonek. In our typesetting system we can easily combine these marks with the glyphs, allowing us to typeset Eastern European languages, Turkish and transliterations of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and cuneiform.