alpha to omega, with stops in-between

So, who uses Greek fonts, anyway?

Well, there are the people who read and write in Greek for starters: approximately 10.6 million in Greece and thousands more around the world. Then there are the classicists: scholars who read ancient Greek and who study myth, language, and literature. Finally, there are the mathematicians, statisticians, and scientists, who use Greek letters as symbols that denote particular constants or variables.

The recent rise in the production and the increase in quality of Greek typefaces gives all three groups reason to rejoice; with relatively new releases by Adobe, Bitstream, and FontShop International, there is unprecedented flexibility in typesetting Greek. The exercise of matching Greek and Latin faces (see Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 2nd ed, pp106–113) is gradually approaching obsolescence.

The first “really good Greek font with accents” (Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms & Use, 3rd ed, p191) appeared in 1528 and was the work of the French printer, Simon de Colines. But perhaps the most well-known, early Greek faces were those of Claude Garamond: les grecs du roi – literally, the royal types – which were produced under the guidance of Robert Estienne and modeled on the hand of the scribe to Francois I, about a decade after the type of Colines. The grecs du roi were cast in three sizes (from largest to smallest, the gros-parangon, the gros-romain, and the Cicero) and were first used in 1544 in an edition of the Præparatio Evangelica of Eusebius (see Updike, pp234–239 for a detailed description and samples; see also Chappell and Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word, p113).

Greek types produced in the last century continued to be based largely on – or at least were designed to be compatible with – existing letterforms: Matthew Carter’s Optima Greek on Hermann Zapf’s Optima, Zapf’s Attika on Wilhelm Pischner’s Neuzeit, Adrian Frutiger’s Univers Greek on his own Univers, and so on (see Livingston, “Sidenote on Greek Type” in Fine Print on Type, pp114–116).

Two of the most beautiful of the 20th century Greek types were those of the book and type designer, Jan van Krimpen. Antigone (1928), designed for compatibility with van Krimpen’s Lutetia (produced four years earlier) was intended for use in mathematical texts, but its calligraphic nature led Walter Tracy to conclude that “it is better suited to literary...texts” (Tracy, Letters of Credit, pp105–106).

Van Krimpen later designed a Greek companion to his Romulus (originally released in 1936; now produced by the Dutch Type Library). This design was based on van Krimpen’s belief that “there should be as little differentiation [between Roman and Greek] forms as possible” (Tracy, p112). Some of the serifed as well as unfamiliar features led Tracy to suggest that van Krimpen “allow[ed] theory to overset practical sense” and to conclude that “Romulus Greek mixed with Romulus Roman does not harmonize with it; it becomes confused with it” (p113). I disagree with Tracy’s analysis and feel that, in the example shown on p113, roman and Greek are ideally compatible. But then I am admittedly rather poor at mixing roman and Greek and have nothing like Tracy’s expertise.

A renaissance in the production of Greek types began in the 1970s, when Mergenthaler Linotype, at the urging of Costas Chryssochoides, produced Baskerville, Century Schoolbook, Helvetica, Optima, Souvenir, and Times Roman Greeks (Livingston, p114). A look at Precision Type’s Font Reference Guide (v5), issued in 1995, shows that, sadly, this selection had not appreciably expanded for nearly 25 years. But in the mid-to-late 1990s, with the implementation of the expanded character set prescribed by Unicode, perhaps coupled with a desire of some vendors to produce high-quality, Greek fonts that were compatible with existing Romans, yet another Renaissance would occur. TrueType faces with Greek characters would include Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet, and Verdana. And PostScript Greek fonts included, among many others, the digital version of Chris Brand’s Albertina, Robert Slimbach’s Minion (issued as a component of Minion’s OpenType variant) and Warnock, Bitstream’s digitization of Antique Olive, Optima, and Univers, as well as several others.

The company that currently seems to emphasize the production of Greek faces to the largest extent is FSI. Recently, under the FontFont imprint, it has released Greek versions of Celeste, DIN, Isonorm, Meta, and Providence; and as part of the “Instant Types” family of Just van Rossum, it has issued Greek variants of Confidential, Dynamoe, Flightcase, Karton, and Stamp Gothic. And with release 31 of the FontFont library, Greek types are now available in all weights of Meta, as well as for Alega and Elementa.

All of the Greek fonts issued by FontFont, as well as most by Bitstream and others, are monotonic – literally, of single pitch – but meaning that the vowels in the Greek alphabet are accompanied by few diacritical marks. Indeed, practically speaking, modern Greek does not use them, but classical Greek does. Greek alphabets that include them are referred to as polytonic; the aforementioned TrueType faces include the polytonic variants, as do several of the Linotype faces adapted in the 1970s.

To be more specific, and perhaps more clear, these polytonic faces are distinguished by their diacritical marks, which may be classified into four groups:

1. accents: acute, circumflex, and grave
2. breathing marks: rough and smooth
3. the iota subscript
4. the diaersis

The polytonic alphabet also may include special characters, such as the lunate and final sigma.

One vendor deserves special mention in conjunction with polytonic faces, and that is the Greek Font Society, based in Athens. It has recently issued polytonic variants of Bodoni and Didot as well as the more commonly known Porson Greek and New (or Neo) Hellenic. Porson Greek – an elegant, sloped Greek face – was actually designed in the early 19th century by the classicist, Richard Porson. In the 20th century it became associated with the texts of the Loeb Classical Library, the Oxford Classical Texts series, and the Greek texts of St. Martin’s Press, to name a few. Victor Scholderer’s subtly serifed New Hellenic is the standard face of the Cambridge Classics series. For more detailed descriptions and samples of these latter two faces in text, see Bringhurst, pp108–109, 256–261. I should add that some versions of Greek Font Society faces are designed specifically for use with a specialized typesetting program for scholars, called GreekKeys.

In the digital age, the purview of type design has expanded to include mathematicians and computer scientists. Twenty years ago, Donald Knuth produced a sloped Greek face as a part of his Computer Modern family for use with TeX (see Knuth, The TeXbook; see also Knuth’s Digital Typography, 1999). Knuth also collaborated with Hermann Zapf to produce AMS Euler, a calligraphic Greek commissioned by the American Mathematical Society, and designed to be compatible with Knuth’s Concrete Roman (see Knuth, Digital Typography, pp339–365 for an interesting account of this collaboration).

The MathTime face, a collection of Greek characters and mathematical symbols, was issued in the early 1990s by Y&Y and was designed to work with Linotype Times in the typesetting systems TeX or LaTeX. Mathematicians have used MathTime with other Roman faces as well (see Hoenig, TeX Unbound, pp316–344 for examples). I have found that MathTime works particularly well, requiring few necessary adjustments, with Linotype Janson Text and Linotype Sabon. And Lucida Greek, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes (see Holmes, “Designing a New Greek Type” in Fine Print on Type, p130) is available in TrueType format in standard issue as well as in PostScript format from Y&Y and has provided mathematical typographers a bolder alternative to Computer Modern or MathTime. More adventurous mathematicians can also use faces such as FF Celeste, DIN, or Meta, for mathematical typography that gets noticed.

I have not described the Cyrillic alphabet, which has enjoyed similar renaissances, and is perhaps available in an even wider variety of faces than Greek. This is only because I have some experience with the Greek alphabet and none with the Cyrillic. But whether it be a Moscow-based daily newspaper, a Greek scholar’s dissertation, or a statistician’s monograph, the rapidly evolving world of digital type, with its room for expanded character sets, is providing for easier, more flexible, and ever-clearer written communication.

02-November 2002