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uppercaselangcss

How do I make text-transform:uppercase work properly with Greek?

The issue I came across has to do with the capitalization of Greek characters by the text-transform: uppercase property.

In Greek, vowels can have acute accents, both small and caps, for instance one in Greek is ένα. In the beginning of a sentence would be Ένα. But when a word or a phrase is written in all caps then Greek grammar says that it should have no accented letters.

As it is now, CSS's text-transform: uppercase capitalizes Greek letters preserving accents which is grammatically wrong (so ένα becomes ΈΝΑ, while it should be ΕΝΑ).

How do I make text-transform: uppercase work properly for Greek?

Solution

  • CSS will handle this fine if it knows that the language is Greek. Merely specifying Greek characters does not tell CSS that the language is Greek; that requires the lang attribute on some parent element (up to and including the html tag).

    <p lang='el' style="text-transform: uppercase">ένα</p>

    should get the job done for you, rendering

    ΕΝΑ

    See fiddle at http://jsfiddle.net/34tww2g8/.