fonts for ancient Greek

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m a beginner here, and I know almost nothing about fonts and typefaces. I use a Mac, and for many years used Palatino as my default typeface. But when I started studying Greek, someone suggested that I get something like “Georgia”, which seemed to be able to produce all the accents, etc., necessary for Greek characters.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some good advice on this topic?

Thanks.

2

I have a Mac, too, and I’ve tried every font that comes with it. I find that Lucida Grande is the only one that can display polytonic Greek correctly. Some others come close, but there’ll still be a box here and there, and some letters will be in different sizes and bolder than the others. Problem is, it’s a sans-serif font when displaying Roman, and I’m not crazy about it. So I switch back and forth between that and Times New Roman. It’s annoying, but it only takes a few seconds. Lucida Grande looks pretty good in Greek, except that it has that tilde-shaped circumflex accent–who invented that?

3

Have a look at the page for this particular forum ‘Learning Greek’. There is a sticky thread about the subject: ‘Representing Greek - Font Notes for New Users’

4

You can get the Gentium font at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_download

There is also many other nice fonts at http://www.greekfontsociety.org/pages/en_typefaces1.html

These should solve many of your problems.

5

Thanks to all of you. I’ve downloaded and installed Gentium and GentiumAlt, and it looks very nice.