I am the Greek God of Fonts

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pster
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I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by pster »

I have figured out everything necessary to have beautiful Greek fonts on Firefox and IE at Perseus Tufts, Perseus Chicago and probably any other site. My Perseus experience is now as clean and beautiful as this Diogenes screenshot: http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Softwar ... cholia.png Actually it may be better after you F11 Firefox to full screen mode. And the LSJ popups work too. So awesome. So much easier on the eyes. If you have any desire for more beautiful fonts, let me know! Offer is only for one week as I will be flushing all font knowledge soon to make space for Sidgwick. :D Not all gods are immortal! But for at least a week, I am the Greek God of Fonts! As you see in the picture, there are already three people who have come asking for divine font guidance!

gfross
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by gfross »

Gorgeous! What fonts are you using? Will they work on my MacBook Pro with Safari? The MacBook does come loaded with lots of fonts. I recently installed Gentium, which I like, but for the most part I just use whatever font the Mac chooses for the Greek Polytonic keyboard (don't know which one that is). I also have a PC with Firefox and IE, but I prefer my Mac. :)

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pster
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

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I like the GFS Porson more than any other font by a fairly wide margin. It is the same one you see in that screenshot above. You can get the font here: http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/pages/en ... s19th.html

I don't have a Mac and I don't know if I really want the answer to this question but I'm going to ask it anyway: When you go to perseus tufts, can you just easily change fonts on your Mac?

I tried Safari on Vista and I wasn't able to get results quickly so I don't know how easy it is to get things working there.

I suppose I should have specified that I am merely the Greek God of Vista Firefox Fonts. :)

gfross
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by gfross »

I downloaded and installed the GFS Porson otf on my MacBook Pro. I then went to Safari/Preferences/Appearance and changed the Standard font display for websites to GFS Porson 16 and the encoding to Unicode (UTF-8). Then I went to the Herodotus web page of Perseus: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... 99.01.0125 . However, the Greek text was not displayed in Porson.

This is what displayed, using Perseus' "Unicode (precombined)" setting:

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.

I don't know what font it is.

The Help menu in Safari explains that I can change the font display only for web pages that do not specify their own fonts. The "Greek Display" window in the "Display Preferences" section of the Perseus Herodotus web page does not list Porson. It lists only Unicode (precombined), Unicode (combining diacriticals), Beta Code, SPIonic, SGreek, GreekKeys, and Latin Transliteration.

So, how did you get Perseus to display its web pages in the Porson font?

I decided to see what would happen if I copied the Perseus extract above into Unicorn, which I have set for italics and 30 point size. Beautiful! However, when I copied the Unicorn text (Command + C) and pasted it here, the text did not display as Porson.
Last edited by gfross on Fri Jun 03, 2011 10:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

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pster
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

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On Mozilla and I believe IE, you can override the font web sites select.

For Safari, I believe you need to set your own style sheet:

http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive ... 60852.html

And here are the details for how you make your own style sheet:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/177 ... -my-fonts/

It shouldn't take more than a few minutes. I had to do something similar for Mozilla.

UPDATE: MORE MAY BE REQUIRED AS THINGS HAVE CHANGED. BRB.

OK, I GOT IT TO WORK ON SAFARI:

1) Put the following in a text file and save it with the extension .css Just call the file safariporson.css
And save it somewhere out of the way:

body {
font-size: 9px;
font-family: "GFS Porson" !important;
}

2) Go to preferences>advanced and choose safariporson.css as your style sheet.

3) Restart Safari

Feel free to change the font-size if that is too small, which it probably is.

Go forth and be happy my child. You can make an offering at my local temple: Chez Spencer just off Folsom on 14th.

gfross
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by gfross »

Didn't work. I created the style sheet in TextEdit as a plain text according to your instructions, set the px as 24 so as to match the Parson point setting in the Safari Standard font window. I then chose OTHER on the Advanced tab menu and selected Safariparson.css. I shut down and restarted Safari. I definitely noticed the change in the font when my Internet home page appeared. However, when I went to the Perseus Herodotus web page, the Greek font was not Parson. It was the same old Perseus font.

So how did you get it to work with Perseus?

Chez Spenser? A bit out of my league. I've been eating at Macy's Cheesecake Factory just about every day (I don't cook). VERY reasonable prices. Outstanding food. Pleasant atmosphere. Professional service.

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pster
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by pster »

I am having trouble also with Tufts Perseus. But it does work at Chicago Perseus:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi ... eekFeb2011

Firefox lets you do custom style sheets for individual web sites. I'll have to do some more research about Safari.

gfross
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by gfross »

pster wrote:I am having trouble also with Tufts Perseus. But it does work at Chicago Perseus:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi ... eekFeb2011

Firefox lets you do custom style sheets for individual web sites. I'll have to do some more research about Safari.
Yes, it works at Chicago Perseus. Nice! On my Mac toolbar I have added a "font sizer" button that allows me to change the font size of a web page easily. Interesting, though, that the XML header for a page in Greek substitutes a sigma ( ς ) for capital R. R appears fine on the pages with a non-XML header.

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pster
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by pster »

I played with it some more to no avail. Do you prefer Tufts to Chicago?

gfross
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Re: I am the Greek God of Fonts

Post by gfross »

I just downloaded and installed Firefox 4 in Windows Vista Home Premium on my Sony VAIO. I also downloaded the Porson OTF, using Firefox. But I don't know what I need to to do now. Where do I unzip it to? And how do I install a font in Windows Vista? I've never done it before.

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