I’m working on OCRing a bilingual (English and Greek) text whose Greek font looks like this:
This is a book published in England around 1800 (Giles, The odyssey of Homer, construed word for word). One of the obstacles to getting a good OCR is that the font is a little unusual. For example, the lowercase epsilon has a shape like a C, sort of like a small version of the uncial. I was able to find a couple of fonts online that seemed to match this style: an old non-unicode font called Greek Old Face Anglophone, and a newer one called BosporosU (part of the Matstronarde New Athena set, but not the same font as New Athena). There is also a commercial font called LaserGreek GraecaUBUS that looks like this, which they say is based on the font in Rahlf’s edition of the Septuagint.
Here’s a comparison with the default font in my install of LibreOffice:
Another noticeable thing is that the feet on the pi have little blobs on the ends.
Is there a term that can be used to describe this style of Greek font? I would say the epsilon looks uncial, but I think “uncial” refers only to fonts that are all uppercase. Fonts described as “miniscule” seem to sometimes have the one style of lowercase epsilon, sometimes the other style. It’s also slanted rather than upright (except that in the Bosporos font, the uppercase letters are upright).
The typeface is, or is very similar to, a variety of Porson, which was based on Richard Porson’s handwriting. You can download GFS Porson for free here https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/gfs-porson
The problem you’re having with the images is that you’ve included a link to the imgbb page for the image, not to the image file itself. Here they are:
I had the same problem recently and found a solution by “inspecting” someone else’s post (i.e. quoting and looking at it).
It seems links provided by the website hosting the image (imgur, imgbb, etc.) don’t work. You need to right-click on the image and then “open image in new tab”. Then, use paste the the adress of this new tab with the following tags in your post here:
[img src=adress-of-the-image][/img]
For instance, your first image is hosted on a page whose adress is: https://ibb.co/RyJVNBr. This adress won’t work here.
After right-clicking on the image and opening in a new tab, the adress of this new tab is: https://i.ibb.co/ySxbpYv/a.png. This is the adress that has to be used with the following tag:
Thanks, folks, for the help with the technical stuff. I should have thought of that myself.
That’s a great tip about Porson, and I love the story behind the font. I suspect that the name Bosporus was chosen because it phonetically evokes Porson (and Greek Old Face Anglophone also seems like a reference to the history of the Porson font).
Papyrologists have developed a comprehensive system of description for literary papyrus scripts (see e.g. the work of E.G.Turner, or R.Seider, or H.Maehler, and the paleographical descriptions in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri series). This could well be adapted for systematic and comparative description of Greek fonts.
Incidentally, Kadmos-Io-Bosporos would make a good set nomenclaturally, but an Io font would be a bit much.
