One thing I’ve always wanted for the Aoidoi commentaries is for the vocabulary headwords in the notes to be bold. In part because I’m old-fashioned and used to that look in student commentares, but also because I personally find it easier to move back and forth between notes and commentary if the word I want in the notes jumps out a bit. I assume I’m not the only one who finds that bolding helpful.
In the past I never had an acceptable bold font I could use in LaTeX (the highly nerdy system I use to produce Aoidoi PDFs). That has changed. I’ve been playing with XeTeX, which is an updated version of LaTeX which among other wonders accepts Unicode directly in your document (no more repellent pseudo-greek in the LaTeX source). It also makes it a lot easier to use pretty much any TrueType or OpenType font you have on your computer. So now all sorts of possibilities are easily in my grasp (we will ignore for the moment the awful handling of some XeTeX guts I had to do to make it work with my favorite metrical package, metre.sty).
I have played around with a few different font combinations aiming at a new house style. I’ve worked up a very small poemlet (Sappho PMG 976, not 796, despite the title) with various combinations. I’m curious to know which ones people favor.
(1) Gentium for Roman, Gentium for non-bold Greek (it has no bold yet), GFS Neohellenic Bold for the headwords: Sample 1 (ggn). (2) All Times, all the time: Sample 2 (ttt). (3) Times for Roman, GFS Didot for non-bold Greek, GFS Didot Bold for the headwords: Sample 3 (tdd).
There isn’t an all GFS Didot because I find something really upsetting about the roman lowercase t in it: it’s too short!
Which ones do people like? Which ones do you hate? I’ll entertain other combinations, but note that the more fonts I use in a document the larger it gets. I’d rather not use three or more fonts in a document.
After examining the sample, the one that is most pleasing to me is sample #1. For example it has the best κ, easily distinguished from what looks like the letter x in the two other samples. This makes reading easier for me.
For some reason I really enjoy looking at different fonts and typography. Of your options, annis, I prefer (1) by far. I’m also very partial to the Porson typeface.
A few years ago I was using LaTeX somewhat heavily. Do you (or does anyone else) have any recommendations on the best way to enter polytonic Greek in a Linux (Ubuntu, if it matters) environment? Perhaps I should acquaint myself with XeTeX.
I like Porson for some things, but in general I’m not a big fan of slanted fonts for masses of main-body text.
A few years ago I was using LaTeX somewhat heavily. Do you (or does anyone else) have any recommendations on the best way to enter polytonic Greek in a Linux (Ubuntu, if it matters) environment? Perhaps I should acquaint myself with XeTeX.
In February XeTeX was made available for Linux, so you might want to.
As for entering Unicode, my favored editor is Emacs. If you’re not one of those vi lunatics — — I can give you some .emacs snippets to help you along.
If you prefer something less arcane, there’s Yudit, a Unicode editor designed just for *nix. There may be others. Even if you choose a different editor, the Yudit site has a good collection of X11 unicode fonts.
And I hate #3. The letters are obtuse to the point they look as if balloons full of water, and flattened by its own weight and are just about to explode
I’m one of the vi-maniac. I never tried to learn the complex key combinations of emacs commands seriously. But if it makes it possible to input unicode in a *TeX source files I should consider changing my attidute of life.
Well, then, in case anyone else comes along looking to do Unicode via Emacs, here’s the email I sent to Didymus:
[face=Courier]There are two separate issues for dealing with Unicode on Emacs. The
first is X11. I find that if you start emacs with the option ‘-fn 9x15’ these days
you usually get a font capable of at least polytonic Greek, and often things
like Chinese. Most X11 font choices will not work with Greek (and I know
nothing about how FreeType might interact with Emacs).
Once X11 is out of the way, we have to tell Emacs to 1) use the Unicode
encoding and 2) how to enter Greek.
For the first part, add this to your .emacs:
;;; force Unicode for html and latex docs, prefer it for everything else
(modify-coding-system-alist ‘file "\.html\’" 'utf-8-unix)
(modify-coding-system-alist ‘file "\.tex\’" 'utf-8-unix)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
If you’re used to using file variables, you can also force the issue this
way:
This uses the LaTeX Ibycus4 encoding to interpret your keystrokes. It is
quite like betacode except that it uses forward and backward single-quote
(’ and `) instead of slashes (/ and ) for the accent. Someday I’m going to
create a greek-betacode option.
Just plain C-\ toggles between entry systems. After you have used
greek-ibycus on a buffer, you don’t need to use C-uC-\ to set it when you
switch back and forth between latin and greek faces.
[/face]
— I can give you some .emacs snippets to help you along.
