How can I write greek in TexnicCenter with Miktex

Question

Using the standard babel package is compeltely counter-intuitive as the letters in the keyboard do not match the babel package and also the accent is in a different key which makes it impossible to write anything longer than a couple of lines (without real patience).

What I am looking is to directly type in greek in the TexnicCenter environment without having use the babel settings.

As suggested here http://www.eelvex.net/latex/greek-in-latex/ these two commands in the preamble should work

\usepackage[english,greek]{babel} \usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc}

but in that case the greek text compiles to ';;;;;;'. When I change the setting to iso-8 \usepackage[utf-8]{inputenc}the document does not compile at all.

Also I am trying to use \usepackage{auto-greek} but in that case I cannot find the package.

When I am saving the .tex file the default setting is in ANSI rather in any of the UTF options. When I change the encoding of the final saved file to UTF it compiles but still no greek in the output.

How is it possible to write greek direct to TexnicCenter and getting a proper document? (A small example of a document would greatly help)

Thanks

Answer 1

I don't have texniccenter so I don't know if it can save a file in iso-8859-7 encoding – but I doubt it, texniccenter never made the impression to me as if it cared about encodings much.

As far as I know the newest texniccenter (version 2.X) can save in utf8. I would use this encoding. You will need a lgrenc.dfu (you can find it on the net) and then this should work fine with pdflatex (edited after the discussion in the comments):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} %needs lgrenc.dfu
\usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
\usepackage[LGRX,T1]{fontenc} %with newer versions of lgrenc.dfu one must
% load (with the help of fontenc) lgrxenc.def
% which can be found on milde.users.sourceforge.net/LGR
\begin{document}
αω \selectlanguage{english} text

\end{document}

If you need a lot of greek you could also consider to use xelatex.