I’ve finally found a LaTeX font for Greek which paints nicely in PDF. The one I use to generate the web pages at Aoidoi.org is very attractive, but when turned into PDF goes all furry and nearly impossible to read.
Here’s a quick example of how the PDFs will look: 11 lines of Hesiod. Some of the accents may be wrong - the new font uses a different encoding than the old system. Comments on the vocab and notes formatting are welcome.
In any case, how do people feel about PDF? I mean, would it seriously put people out if I stopped doing web pages with the Greek text?
That’s another benefit of the PDF. Right now, printing off a commented poem from the web page would have very blurry greek, assuming it even lined up correctly.
This format is probably the future of Aoidoi’s poems. The system I’m using now is too brittle.
I don’t think PDF would put anyone off - it’s such a common format these days and it prints very well. Sometimes web pages can get a bit garbled if they are not coded exactly right; PDF is always the same and easy to handle. It also saves easier if you just want to keep the document on a CD or disk for reference and not print it. I do that with a lot of the Textkit stuff as I don’t always want to have to print out pages, find a folder etc.
But I think PDF is a good format that many people can still read under various platforms. It has become rather ubiquitous now, so I can’t imagine anyone complaining about the switch.
The Kerkis Greek and Latin faces were designed to go together, and they do that very well. There are a few things about the Greek face that I don’t care for, but it’s still worlds better than the annoying curly italics like the old Teubner font.
Perhaps I’ll convert some of the larger poems already in place to this. The larger the poem, the more friendly the text with footnotes approach is.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the line numbering, but on the other hand, I really hate counting back and forth to find the right notes in a commentary.
I have a copy of DBG Septuagint which used a really elegant greek font in the foreword. (But they used a somewhat awkward font for the text). but I can’t find an equivalent electronic font. It had a [size=150]ρ[/size] that’s similar to that of Palatino Linotype or TITUS Cyberbit Basic that you can see at http://www.russellcottrell.com/greek/fonts.htm
And I prefer TITUS Cyberbit Basic.
Ooh. I’ve never seen a Caslon style of Greek. Not sure the gamma is good. The lower psi is very odd, too.
The TITUS Cyberbit is nice, though it has the kappa I hate, but at least it isn’t slanted. Slanting Greek fonts (like the ubiquitous Porson of the OCTs) irritate me for some reason.
The Aristarchos is a nice slanted face, though I think the final sigma is too heavy, and that the Gentium Alt has a better one.
Alas, setting up a TrueType font to work in LaTeX is still such an annoyance that I’ve not yet felt up to it. As a Unix geek I live in constant danger of becoming distracted by the interesting technology of making a web site on Classical Greek poetry, and not accomplishing any actual reading of Greek. So I’ll hold off for a bit longer.
As a matter of fact my samples are produced with latex, using psgreek package. Most good fonts from mingshey’s link are included there (at least they look alike).
Although this method does not use any ttf, it requires one to use betacode-like system (very unstandard) to typeset greek text. To work this over I have made some python scripts to convert from unicode or perseus’ betacode into the format required by psgreek. Although final sigma autoconversion was supported, I think I have broken something just recently…
These two fonts are indeed looking similar but oxonia has way better kerning, while oldface has more stylish capitals that are not italic, which imho looks better. This is also how it looks in FGB’s greek face.
I wish I could bring those capitals into oxonia somehow…
Ah! I’d seen psgreek but for some reason assumed it would only work on a particular PC version of TeX. I’ll have to look into this more.
Although this method does not use any ttf, it requires one to use betacode-like system (very unstandard) to typeset greek text. To work this over I have made some python scripts to convert from unicode or perseus’ betacode into the format required by psgreek.
I’ve done the same, actually. That’s funny.
At least Ibycus4 uses something very much like betacode. The babel encoding (m~hnin >'aeide je’a) is annoying, but I’m getting used to it.
