Greek and Fonts

Owned by Kaitlin Bagley
Last updated: Jul 19, 2012Version comment
2 min read

Technical Background

In Unicode, Greek characters exist on two different code pages, the Greek and Coptic page (range 0370 - 03FF) and the Greek Extended page (range 1F00 - 1FFF).  The main Greek and Coptic page has the standard characters necessary for Modern Greek.

The Greek Extended page is the one you really care about, because that's where all of the polytonic characters are encoded.

Now here's the rub: Just because a font is unicode and has the characters from one code page does NOT mean that they have any characters from the Extended code page.  In fact, it's possible that the creators of a font only create glyphs for SOME of the more commonly used characters in the Extended code page. 

Moral of the story: not all fonts are created equal, so choose wisely.

Fonts in MS Word

Now MS Word tries to be 'helpful' and when you open a document that has characters (such as ἑ) it will try to use any font that it can to show you that character.  I'm not sure if it's Word or the operating system, but something looks at the text in the document and then consults a list of fonts containing ἑ and uses whatever it can find to properly display this character.  This is why Word sometimes automatically switches fonts in the middle of words, it means that the font that you've chosen does not actually contain all of the characters you are typing and so it's doing font substitution to make the display happen, no matter how ugly.

So why does font substitution now work when I use New Athena Unicode in my documents?

For some reason unbeknownst to me, Word and/or the operating system (OS) doesn't know to equate New Athena Unicode to other fonts containing Greek.  I don't know if that's because of the way the font is created or if it's because the OS is being stupid about it.

There are two possible fixes:

  • Download New Athena Unicode and install it, you can get it for free from http://apagreekkeys.org/NAUdownload.html
  • Select all of the text in the document and manually change the font to something that does have all of the Greek characters.  

Other font suggestions

Macintosh

Sans-Serif

  • Arial
  • Courier (ugly)
  • FreeSans (ugly)
  • Helvetica
  • Lucida Grande
  • Microsoft Sans Serif
  • Tahoma (regular, but some characters missing in bold)
    Serif
  • Arno Pro
  • FreeSerif
  • GaramondPremrPro
  • Gentium (free download)
  • Minion Pro Medium
  • New Athena Unicode (free download)
  • Times

Windows

Sans-Serif