WRITING GREEK WITH VIM AND LATEX

The process of making printable Greek files with vim has improved a lot with recent versions of vim. You can type both modern Greek and Greek with the full complement of accents (polutoniko). This describes the steps I use in Debian (Sid, but should work in any branch or indeed in other flavours of Linux).

  1. make sure all the texlive stuff is installed. This should give you both greek and polutonikogreek (i.e. accents, breathings etc.).

  2. This is the template I use:
    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage[polutonikogreek]{babel}
    \usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc}
    \begin{document}
    \selectlanguage{polutonikogreek}

  3. To produce your file and type the text in Greek, do the following:
    set enc=greek
    set fenc=greek
    set keymap=greek
    Note: If you don't like the way the Greek keymap works you can edit it (located at /usr/share/vim/vim73/keymap/greek.vim in my case).

  4. Type your text: note that accents come BEFORE the vowel they relate to. Use > and < for breathings (if you want them).

  5. Run latex on the file you have made and check with xdvi to make sure that it has come out correctly.

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