Lex wrote:Testing the look of the fonts....
Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
[edit] Hmmmm.... I dunno, looks OK to me on Windows Vista Home Premium/IE 8. I would like a built-in Greek keyboard popup or something, though.
The non-diacritic characters are displayed in the font Verdana, while the polytonic characters are displayed in the font Arial. Do you not see that these are distinct fonts in the display? On my screen, the polytonic characters are bigger than the non-polytonic ones. Additionally, for whatever reason, the χ (chi) in the font Verdana does not even descended below the lower line. It's just odd.
Of course the whole thing displays as sans-serif polytonic Greek. Do you see a difference in the size of these two epsilons? εἐ - For me, the epsilon with the smooth breathing is a bit taller than the one without. It's the same with all of the diacritical characters.
This is why I think a font that has full Latin and Greek support (like Gentium) would be advisable for the main font. It could be embedded with the stylesheet even.
At least having a tag that would allow Greek text to take on a single polytonics-supporting font would be really welcome. It could be labelled [el] or [gr], but something like that would be nice.
(I have a [gr] tag that I created on my forums, and it works very nicely to easily set off Greek text. I use GFS Porson as the main font.)