When I view a page written in a Greek unicode font some of the Greek characters display correctly but the rest display as rectangular boxes. Is there a specific font I need to download or something like that?
Thanks,
-Jonathan.
Make sure that you have a unicode font on your system (most probably you already have Tahoma or Arial Unicode MS on your system). But I guess you’ve got a problem with your browser. If you’re using the Internet Explorer you will have to configure it a little bit or you start browsing with Firefox or Opera which don’t need extra configuration in most cases.
Hi JLatin1,
From IE’s toolbar:
Tools > Internet Options > General > Fonts
In the resulting dialog, select a Unicode font in the left-hand (‘Web page font’) list.
As Clemens noted, ‘Arial Unicode MS’ is a likely candidate. But don’t use Tahoma - it is not fully a Unicode font. Other Unicode fonts include:
palatino linotype,
georgia greek,
cardo,
galilee unicode gk,
gentium,
vusillus old face italic
Cordially,
Paul
But don’t use Tahoma - it is not fully a Unicode font.
Oh really? Why not? I always thought it would support polytonic Greek…
Clemens 
It’s not a full Unicode font. There are ranges it doesn’t support. Well, let me be careful: the Tahoma version I have on Windows 2000 - 2.80 - does not support all ranges. Specifically, it has no mappings for Unicode ‘extended greek’ (x1f00 - 1fff). It does support the basic greek in the Unicode ‘greek and coptic’ range (x370-3ff). But my version of Tahoma cannot, for example, render lowercase alpha with smooth breathing and acute accent.
By the way, later Mozilla browsers seem to do a kind of font emulation for non-mapped characters. Just because you can see the character in a Mozilla browser (instead of a ‘box’ or question mark character) does not mean that the font itself supports the character.
For a fairly complete list of Windows Unicode fonts see http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_windows.html#greek
Cordially,
Paul
There are bazillions of pages on the web for dealing with unicode font issues involving polytonic Greek. I have bookmarked a ton of them at my del.icio.us page. You can download fonts from some of them, test various regions of the extended Greek codepages on others; some have bitmaps of what the fonts look like; some talk about the various problems people have with different browser and so forth, and there are even a few converters for getting from SPIonic or Beta Code or whatever to Unicode. There is even a web-based Unicode inputter.
Try this: http://del.icio.us/jjmg/unicode+greek
But my version of Tahoma cannot, for example, render lowercase alpha with smooth breathing and acute accent.
Hm, I just tested my Tahoma version (came with Windows 2002, so it might be a newer version) and it had no problems with lowercase alpha with rough breathing and circumflex and iota subscript so I guess it’s quite complete, but anyways, I would also go for Arial Unicode MS if I had to choose between the two…
Hi Clemens,
That’s interesting. Two questions:
-
if you double-click on the font file itself in Control Panel, what is the version number?
-
with what program did you test your Tahoma ?
Thanks.
Cordially,
Paul
Hi Paul,
I’m sorry, actually I made two mistakes in my previous post:
Instead of “Windows 2002” there should be “Word 2002” —> so I tested it with Word.
I just checked and I discovered that I have an even newer Version of Tahoma on my machine (so it must have come in with some other program…) - it’s Version 3.14 from the year 2004
Clemens
Hi Clemens,
Curiouser and curiouser. On my XP Pro system I have version 3.00. It still lacks support for extended greek range.
If you are amenable, please try this: set up MS Word with Tahoma and paste in several lines of Greek text, perhaps from Perseus. Can you detect any differences between extended greek characters and basic greek characters; e.g., between alpha with breathing and accent versus alpha unadorned?
When I do this test with Word 2002 I detect subtle differences: the characters from the extended greek range don’t look quite the same, they are thinner and not as tall.
Thanks.
Cordially,
Paul
I’m curious what you mean by “set up MS Word with Tahoma”. Do you mean, “select Tahoma as the font in MS word”, and then pasting in the lines from Perseus?
You should be aware that doing it in this order won’t mean that the lines you paste in are in the Tahoma font. You need to paste in the lines and then select them all and then change them all to Tahoma.
(Although frankly you would probably be better of just using Arial Unicode MS.)
I am indeed aware that after pasting one must select the text and reassert the font.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, that Clemens is so aware.
Cordially,
Paul
I thought I’d better make a snapshot… (I know it’s a bit large and I’ll delete it, after Paul’s seen it )
edit
Clemens
Sweet - your Tahoma 3.14 is definitely an improvement on the 3.0 version.
Now, where to find this version…
Thanks for the info.
Cordially,
Paul