# describing the style of this Greek font

**URL:** <https://www.textkit.com/t/describing-the-style-of-this-greek-font/18439>\
**Category:** Learning Greek\
**Created:** [May 21, 2021, 4:42pm UTC](https://www.textkit.com/t/describing-the-style-of-this-greek-font/18439 "2021-05-21T16:42:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bcrowell](https://www.textkit.com/user_avatar/www.textkit.com/bcrowell/32/186_2.png) [@bcrowell](https://www.textkit.com/u/bcrowell)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2021, 4:42pm UTC](https://www.textkit.com/t/describing-the-style-of-this-greek-font/18439/1 "2021-05-21T16:42:56Z")

</div>

I’m working on OCRing a bilingual (English and Greek) text whose Greek font looks like this:

![](https://i.ibb.co/ySxbpYv/a.png)

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:

![](https://i.ibb.co/1GqNnP7/a2.png)

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).

---

_[View the full topic](https://www.textkit.com/t/describing-the-style-of-this-greek-font/18439)._