Reading epub w/ Greek on Calibre

How do I properly set up Calibre to automatically display Polytonic Greek characters?
I got this epub from the internet archive,
and it doesn’t display any Greek at all. The pdf version under Foxit Reader, for example, shows everything properly,
then again it’s an image scan of the book pages.

epub (p.10.9 in Calibre):

  • I have given a complete analysis of the rhetorical treatise known under the name of
    the 'PrjTopinrj ^09 ‘A\e%ai>$poi’, a work long attributed to…

pdf (p.20 bottom page in Foxit):

Apparently, each epub has a CSS stylesheet which can be viewed when browsing the content of the epub with an archiving soft like winrar.
Here it is:

body {
    font-family: "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;
}
h1,h2,h3,h4 {
    font-family: "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;
}
p {
    font-family: Georgia,  "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, "Times New Roman", serif;
}
img {
    display: block; text-align: center; margin: 1em auto;
}

The default settings in Calibre has Times New Roman for serif and Verdana for sans.
I tried changing the serif to Palatino Linotype and the sans to Arial Unicode MS, but that didn’t do
anything.

A different epub, which I can’t find the link from which i downloaded it, has 38 pages of unicode text
examples (greek, hebrew w. vowelization, latin lorem ipsum ) and it displays everything without me fiddling with anything.
Although this particular file has different folder with the embedded fonts, and one with the stylesheet, something
the Internet Archive’s epub doesn’t have.
I uploaded it to megaupload:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ATAO469Z

One thing that was odd about this file is that Times New Roman, despite being completely Polytonic Greek-enabled,
did not display the accented letters.

Any help would be appreciated.

I don’t have an answer for you yet, but this file you uploaded on Megaupload is very instructive. I copied it over to my nook and found that some of the fonts displayed diacritics beautifully, while others displayed question marks. Below are the fonts that did or did not work on the nook. Most of them are TTF; I read somewhere that you needed Open Fonts, but obviously TTFs work just as well. In fact, the OTFs in the folder were among those that did not work. The SIL fonts come from the same file, apparently; two did not work, while SIL Gentium was one of the nicest looking.

The Fonts that worked were:
DejaVu Sans
DejaVu Serif
Free Sans
Free Serif
SIL GentiumAlt

The fonts that did NOT were:
Default Font
Default Monospace
Default Sans-Serif
Default Serif
Arial
Times
Verdana
Georgia
Liberation
Liberation Serif
Fontin Sans
Fontin
SIL Andika
SIL Ezra

The issue with the archive.org files is much simpler I believe – it’s just that the epub files are created automatically using ocr software, which doesn’t recognize the Greek letters and outputs useless letters – compare the text files they have up.

Thanks, Antonios, for listing the fonts that work. :slight_smile:

Thank you, modus. That seems to be it. Calibre has conversions between different file formats, but I cannot find one from doc/docx directly
to epub, so, for example, I have to first convert my notes on Plato’s Apology to pdf, then convert it to epub which renders all Greek characters
non-recognizable. I’ve asked on their official forum and they’ve answered pretty much the same reply as you. I’ll have to be content with pdf for now.