The best Greek fonts

[Nigel Chapman]

A sample of my favourites -- click the link if you find the image is clipped in your browser -- http://chapman.id.au/images/font-sample.png



Download Links

SIL Gentium lacks some critical marks if viewing e.g. the SBL Greek NT, and has no bold face, but it's the most attractive (to my eye). On linus install with sudo apt-get install ttf-sil-gentium or similar.

• http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium

For completeness, Cardo, Athena New Unicode or SBLGreek can't be beaten, though SBL is the least readable or attractive by some margin (again, to my eye).

• http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html
• http://apagreekkeys.org/NAUdownload.html
• http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/Bib ... Greek.aspx

For typesetting, with excellent Bolds and Italics, use the numerous highly professional Greek Font Society faces: e.g. GFS Bodoni or GFS Elpis for a serif or GFS NeoHellenic for (finally) a decent sans-serif.

• http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/pages/en ... s20th.html

[JBarach-Sr]

"Times New Roman" has all the characters and is much easier on the eyes than Georgia, Gentium, or "Palatino Linotype" IMHO.
But like beauty, it is in the eyes.
Cheers,
John Barach, Sr.

[Ken M. Penner]

"Times New Roman" has all the characters and is much easier on the eyes than Georgia, Gentium, or "Palatino Linotype" IMHO.

The character sets included in some fonts, especially Times New Roman and the other historical core Windows fonts (Arial and Courier New) has grown over the years. TNR, Arial, and Courier New are all now very complete for biblical studies (Polytonic Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, diacritical marks, etc.) , but that has not always been the case. It is helpful to know which version of the font one has in mind when saying which characters it includes.
I have Times New Roman from Windows 7 and Office 2010, which is version 5.07, copyright 2010. My Tahoma is version 5.06, from 2008. My Trebuchet MS is version 5.00, from 2006.

[RDecker]

I posted info on my blog yesterday regarding a relatively new Adobe font that includes polytonic Greek: Adobe Text Pro. You can find it here, with a png sample and a pdf: http://ntresources.com/blog/?p=1507

[Ken M. Penner]

Speaking of new polytonic Greek fonts, this one is quite new: Brill's own font, designed by John Hudson of Tiro fame (designer of the SBL Greek and SBL Hebrew fonts).
http://www.brill.nl/news/brill-typeface

[Louis L Sorenson]

I just found SIL's new Gentium Plus font. The font can be downloaded at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page ... m_download.

The site says

Gentium Plus is based on the original Gentium design. However, it now has the full OpenType and Graphite support that Doulos SIL and Charis SIL contain — including full IPA support!

Currently Gentium Plus has Regular and Italic weights. A future release will include Bold and Bold Italic.

and

Two complete font families - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic - are now available. They do not contain the same extensive character repertoire as Gentium or Gentium Plus.

and

The original Gentium fonts were released in 2003 and are now under version 1.1 of the SIL Open Font License (OFL). These award-winning fonts will continue to be available. However, they do not have the smart font code now available in Gentium Plus. In practical terms, this means that diacritics (combining marks) will not stack properly. If you require diacritic positioning, you should download Gentium Plus.

My questions are (1) have the Greek characters changed any? (2) Does the change help the Greek diacritics line up better? - Were there problems before? and (3) is it important to upgrade?

[RDecker]

The Plus font has been out for some time. No noticeable changes to the glyphs. Diacritics worked fine before so long as you were using pre composed characters. My guess is that the changes are only relevant when NOT using the pre composed variants---and the only reason for that might be to employ some of the fancy typographical options available with InDesign or similar programs using the Graphite or OpenType features. For normal word processing and text entry those features are not relevant. The Plus font is worth having, however, for the additional characters now included. Now if only they would release bold and bold-italic faces...

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

My questions are (1) have the Greek characters changed any? (2) Does the change help the Greek diacritics line up better? - Were there problems before? and (3) is it important to upgrade?

On different platforms (operating systems) there are different "engines" which draw the letters to the screen. How well it works depends on your system and even on the specific application. Therefore the changes may fix problems on some platform which may have not existed at all on some other platform. If you don't understand the technical details mentioned you just have to test the font for your specific needs. I have sometimes read about the font rendering technologies but don't remember anything... it's almost black magic for uninitiated.

Edit: But RDecker may very well be right.

[RDecker]

I have used Gentium since it was a beta release on both Mac and Windows. There have never been any rendering or alignment problems on Mac OS X up through and including 10.8 (Mt Lion) and on Win up through v 7. (I've not used 8.) I have not used any of the hi end page design programs such as InDesign, etc, but in Word (Mac & Win versions), FileMaker (Mac & Win), Pages, or EazyDraw, etc. the Greek text is always correct when entered with Keyman (on Windows) or my own Mac keyboard file.