What font do you use?

[Cheiromancer]

If you type in Greek, what font do you like to use?

I had been using Palatino Linotype, but lately I have become fond of Gentium plus for when I type in Greek. I like the rho to have a straight, vertical tail, and I like the large diacritics. The letters look elegant, as if written with a fountain pen.

[jeidsath]

I like GFS Didot:

http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/pages/en_typefaces19th.html

It’s almost perfect, but there doesn’t seem to be any support for the non-tonal vowel diacritics. For example, the upsilon will appear as another font in: Καΰστρου

[jeidsath]

Also, to get that fountain pen effect, I mostly just write with a fountain pen.

[Cheiromancer]

That GFS Didot font is very striking! I like the quill-pen look to it, and it has very dramatic diacritics. But for some reason I find a block of Greek text in Gentium plus to be easier to read than the same text in GFS Didot. Maybe the line thickness is a little too variable? I’m not sure exactly, but there are three specific things about GFS Didot that I didn’t care for:

1. Using the English keyboard results in illegible letters; they are too compressed. So you can’t alternate between Greek and English without changing fonts. Gentium plus has an attractive (and legible) English font, and so you could write a paper entirely in Gentium plus without any problems.

2. The capital Greek letters do not match the style of the lower case letters. The Caps are made with non-tapering straight lines and have serifs. This is true for Gentium plus as well, but is much less noticeable given the “fountain pen” look of that font.

3. The large diacritics sometimes lead to trouble. The perispomenon of οὗ is partially omitted, and the perispomenon joins with the delta in δἶος.

edit: It seems that this problem may be fixed by adjusting other settings in my word processor. At the apagreekkeys.org site I read that

@apagreekkeys.org

For legibility of the accents, the APA fonts have characters that extend vertically up and down farther than most fonts. In some cases, tops or bottoms of characters may appear cut off on the computer screen, although they will print completely. If this happens, it is a good idea to adjust the paragraph formatting entry for line spacing. In Microsoft Word, for instance, instead of using the setting “single” use the setting “at least” and make the line high 2 or 3 points greater than the font size you are using. That is, if you are typing in 12-point BosporosU, set the line spacing to at least 14 or 15 points; or if you are typing in 14-point KadmosU, set the line spacing to at least 16 or 17 points.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to restore the obscured perispomenon by tinkering with the settings.

On the other hand, I didn’t notice anything funny with the upsilon in Καΰστρου.

One font I like is found in Chad Bochan’s “Iliad A - Scanned West 1998 Teubner text”. I am not sure what font it is. Looking at the PDF properties I thought it was BosporosU, but there are lunate sigmas in Chad’s document and the rho is more solid than the BosporosU seems to be. The only problem with Chad’s font is the mismatch between the capital and the lower case letters. The caps are vertical, not tilted, and the uniform width of the strokes and serifs sets them apart stylistically.

[Σαυλος]

Here’s a nice resource:
http://ntresources.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FontsWithUnicodePolytonicGreek.pdf

I too liked Palatino Linotype very much. I liked the Greek and the English, but did not like the screen English. It was hard on the eyes.
I have settled on using GentiumAlt.

• –It’s fine in English or Greek.
  –It isn’t glitchy with accents. I’ve found that some accents don’t show up right when I type them with some fonts, but maybe that’s the fault of my custom Dvorak Polytonic Greek keyboard.
  –It’s easy to read on the screen.

I imagine Gentium Alt is just the same as Gentium Plus, but since Plus is under development, I’ll stick with gentiumalt.

A font I really like for certain uses is New Athena Unicode - a free font from APA.
http://apagreekkeys.org/GKUfonts.html#NAU

What is GentiumAlt? (only in the original Gentium package)

It is a version of the font with redesigned diacritics (flatter ones) to make it more suitable for use with stacking diacritics, and for languages such as Vietnamese. The Greek glyphs also use the Porsonic (single-curve) design for the circumflex. Since the original Gentium fonts do not include any ‘smart’ rendering routines, there is no easy way to access these alternate diacritic shapes from within the original Gentium font. The encoding of the fonts are the same, so the same text can be viewed with either one. There is also no problem with having both font families installed at the same time.

[daivid]

I use Linux and being happy with the default fonts I have never felt the need to install the true type fonts that are standard on Windows. I assumed that I was using Nimbus Roman but it seems that doesn’t support Greek letters so it turns out I have been using DejaVu Serif which the system gives me instead.

It’s not flashy but very clear.