by Annarella Perra, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , Tony Smith, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and Julian Morgan, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Introduction

Fonts are sets of alphabetical characters we can use to write in all world languages. All modern computers come with sets of fonts installed in various different locations. In a normal Windows operating system, fonts are kept in a system folder, C:\Windows\Fonts. In a Mac OSX system, fonts may be kept in different folders, depending on whether they are system fonts or specific to the user. Information is available in the Help system on the computer.

Font installation

Besides the fonts which are pre-installed on our computers, we can install new ones by downloading them and putting them into the relevant fonts folder. In some cases a font can be installed in Windows, which then does not activate straightaway. In particular, we have had reports about this, concerning the Athenian font, which is often used to display Greek texts in Perseus. The procedure to activate a font in Windows is simple, where it does not happen automatically.

i)     Open folder C:\Windows\Fonts   
ii)    Find the font which is causing the trouble, eg Athenian
iii)   Double click the font’s icon
iv)   Close the dialog box

When you open the font box, you should see all the Greek characters displayed. After closing it, the font should be activated and it should be possible to use it to write or read text.

Avoiding difficulty

If you are not a technical guru and only want to be able to print some occasional quotations from existing Greek texts, you can pretty much go to Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) and find the text you want, then copy what you need and paste it into a word-processed document. These days, it is unlikely that this will go wrong.
The most likely issue you will have at this stage is that all the weblinks will be copied with the text, which will end up looking ugly: to solve this, paste the text from the Edit Menu, selecting Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted text, which strips out all the links but leaves the rest of the Greek in good shape.

However, if you want to be able to type proper Greek and master the difficulties encountered, read on…

From beta code to Unicode

A few years ago, most fonts had limited numbers of characters, so a font set might be restricted to 256 separate characters. This could be extended using a building block system, called beta code, which allowed diacritical markings to be added to the Greek letters one by one. Until a few years ago, beta code systems were the most commonly used ways of writing in ancient Greek, though that situation has changed recently with the arrival of Unicode, a system which allows font sets to have unlimited amounts of characters. A Unicode font can consist of many different combinations of letters and diacritical markings (polytonic), some of which can be built up as the users create the words on screen, in a similar way to beta code, and some of them made as pre-existing combinations.

To explain things further, see the line below, from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

 qeou\j me\n ai)tw= tw=nd' a)pallagh\n po/nwn

The first line shows what was actually typed to start off with, whereas the second line shows what the beta code system has created, by assembling the diacritical markings around the letters. The font used here is SPIonic, and the source for the quotation is the Perseus website (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu).

There are many places on the web where you can learn how to use beta code and practise your skills, which will be of most use if you have an older word processor or computer, or just prefer old-fashioned technologies.

Problems with beta code

Not all fonts using beta code retain their compatibility with text typed, if you ever change the font, so once a document has been produced with one particular font, it becomes extremely difficult to modify with another font. For the same reason, a webpage written in ancient Greek may sometimes only be displayed properly if the required font is installed on the computer in question, and also, not all the key combinations are the same for different fonts using the beta code system.

One excellent website which explains this whole set of issues well can be found at http://litot.es/smr/unicode-converter/. Most interestingly, this website (and there are many others too!) offers a conversion system form various beta code fonts to the new, super duper Unicode systems.

Unicode polytonic Greek fonts

Unicode fonts, as described above, have almost limitless numbers of possible character combinations, so they are extremely useful in transferring texts from one source to another, without destroying any of the original files. Polytonic simply means that the characters can consist of multiple diacritical markings. As times goes by we are seeing polytonic fonts taking over these days, which is to be welcomed. Polytonic characters can be formed by selecting pre-combined characters from a chart, or by building them up in a similar way to the beta code system.

There are various websites which are extremely helpful in this regard, such as http://www.russellcottrell.com/greek/ which gives a good explanation of how the systems can work, as well as listings of fonts which can be used. Try this website if you’d like some hands-on experience, at http://www.typegreek.com/. One website where you can create polytonic Greek by clicking on a chart of pre-combined characters can be found at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/letters_table_caretpos2.htm.

Some Unicode polytonic systems are free, some are commercial: it is not our place in the CIRCE Project to recommend one particular solution and you should bear in mind that if a font is Unicode polytonic, it should work quite easily and well with other similar fonts.

The main disadvantage of Unicode is that the size of text files is double that of ASCII files, because it uses 2 bytes per character instead of 1 only. For most of us, this is a very minor matter these days. For reasons of size most Unicode fonts only include a subset of the full Unicode specification, but many include the Greek and Latin ranges you will find useful. For instance, if you have a Windows PC, you will almost certainly have a font called Tahoma installed on it. This is an attractive sans serif font that has Latin with macra and fully accented Greek. On a Mac with OS X 10.2 or later you will have Lucida Grande with the same range of characters for work in Latin and Greek.

Typing Greek using what you have already got on your computer

To avoid having to remember key combinations for accented Greek, use the character palette, where characters are displayed in a grid and you just click to insert them in your text. In Mac OS X (10.2 and later) there is a system-level character palette that can be turned on in the "Input Menu" pane of "International". This can be used with the TextEdit application that is a standard part of OS X.

If you are running Windows XP, you can enter Greek or Latin with macra from a character palette very simply. Select Tahoma as your font in your word processor. Select "Symbol..." from the "Insert" menu to open the "Symbol" dialog. Make sure the "Symbols" tab is selected, and that the font is set to "Tahoma" with "Unicode (hex)" chosen from the list at the bottom right. From the "Subset" list at the top right choose "Latin Extended-A", "Basic Greek", or "Greek Extended", depending which characters you want to insert. Double-click characters to insert them directly in your document. Close the "Symbol" dialog when you have finished.

Creating a document with Latin macra or Greek is straightforward. Select Tahoma as your font (you can experiment with other fonts, such as "Lucida Sans Unicode", or any other Unicode font that you have installed, according to the instructions in the "Fonts" appendix). From the "Insert" menu select "Special Character...", then choose the range of characters you need from the "Subset" list. Click on the characters to add them to the "Characters" field at the bottom of the window, then click the "OK" button to transfer all the characters into your document.

You could also use the simple word processor "WordPad", in combination with the "Character Map" utility. Both of these programs are free and installed as part of Windows XP. Open WordPad by pressing the "start" button, then select the following menu options: "All programs", "Accessories", "WordPad". Open Character Map from the "start" button with the options: "All programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", "Character Map". In Character Map choose "Group by: Unicode Subrange" and then choose "Latin" to see the vowels with macra, or "Greek" for fully-accented Greek. Double-click the letters you want in order to transfer them to the "Characters to copy" field, and press the "Copy" button to copy them to the clipboard ready to copy into your WordPad document.

A document encoded in Unicode can easily be read on other systems, so for future-proofing and portability create your documents in Unicode. This is a standard that is here to stay.

Greek fonts in Perseus

Many classicists use Perseus online (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) and frequent requests for advice are received from people who struggle to implement the technology to display the Greek correctly. By reading the material above, we hope some light has been shed on the situation, but some further specific tips follow here, which we hope may be of some use. 

It may be worth saying that if you decide to use the new version of Perseus online, at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/, you may well solve all your font problems immediately, so perhaps you should try that first. There are various advantages in this new version, though it has not proved to be as reliable as many of us would have liked to see.

If you are trying to use the older version of Perseus and want to see Greek on your screen but are failing to do so, make sure in the first instance that you have a compatible font installed on your own computer. For most PC users, the Athenian font is suitable for use with Perseus, though it is by no means the only font which works. You can download Athenian from http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/greekkeys/GreekKeys.html.

Now go to Perseus and find a Greek text. It may not look correct as you see it.

Click on  Configure display. Select Greekkeys as the font, using the radio button.

Now click on Set Configuration. It should return to the Greek, which should now display properly.

If Greekkeys does not work, try different options in Configure Display. One of these will give you a perfect display if you persevere. 

Other fonts for Classicists

Classics teachers may find the following fonts useful:

Roman Rustica is a font for epigraphical inscriptions, using only capital letters. It is freeware and can be downloaded from http://www.historian.net/files.htm.

Anaxiphorminx is a font for metrical scansion of ancient Greek and Latin poetry. It is freeware and can be downloaded from http://www.historian.net/files.htm.


Further Information

A further paper written by CIRCE partner Annarella Perra, in Italian, can be found at http://www.docenti.org/SW_HW/software/font_tutorial.htm.

For further information about Unicode, see http://www.Unicode.org/.