How to Type in Greek Part III: The Best Greek Fonts

This is the third past in a series of posts about typing in Greek. The first post was about the the joys (and necessity) of Unicode character encoding. The second detailed how to set up a Greek keyboard. Now you need a good font. While up to this point we have been dealing with encodings and characters, the way in which an operating system matches the push of a key to a letter in a given language; now we are going to focus our attention on glyphs, the way in which different characters are represented by a particular font.

What do you want in a Greek Font?

Eye Candy: The most immediate qualification for a good font is eye candy. Seriously: this is important. The better looking your font, the easier it is to read, both for you and your audience.

Check out the image to the left. Which do you like better? The top glyph is what we call “sans serif” because it does not have the fancy shaping and decorative formatting that the bottom glyph has. Sans serif fonts are particularly common on the internet because they are the easiest to read, even if not the prettiest over all. Times New Roman, by contrast, is a serif font. If you write your papers using a serif font, your Greek should be a serif font as well (and vice-versa). This is usually just a matter of personal preference, but generally readers prefer serif over sans serif for extended amounts of text, and the opposite for presentations (PowerPoint) and Web pages.

A more specifically Greek decision involves accents, the most important of which is the circumflex. This again is a matter of preference, but I prefer the full semicircle over the tilde. Having said that, the font I am eventually going to recommend uses the tilde. Oh well…

Free: The second (and most important) qualification of a Greek font is that it should be free. There are two types of free: free beer and free speech. The former is probably the most immediate concern, but the latter is really the most important. A “free beer” font will be free to use and will not encumber you with licensing fees should you decide to publish your work using that font. The Microsoft fonts seem like they are free-beer fonts—at least you probably do not remembering paying for them—but in reality they are encumbered by a pretty strict license. They will be fine for basic personal use, but if you are planning to start a Greek-Verse-Greeting-Card business, or am online journal for NT studies, you might want to pick something else. At the very least, you want to use a font that is free for both non-commercial and commercial use.

You may also be interested in a “free speech” font. In addition to being free as in free beer, free speech fonts allow you to redistribute, modify, and have absolute control over all underlying mechanics. You can use them, change them, and distribute them, all without asking permission.

In short, you want a font that is licensed under an a so called “copy left” license. These are “open source” licenses. Applied to fonts, these licenses define the parameters by which you can use and modify the glyphs in question; they will be royalty-free (“free beer”) and also free-to-modify (“free speech”) under certain conditions. .

So what fonts should I use?
The following is a list of the best fonts available. Only Unicode fonts are included:

• Gentium would be my first-choice recommendation. It is a serif font. The standard versions uses the tilde for the circumflex, though an alternative version (GentiumAlt) is now included in the download that uses the half-moon. It includes a full Latin set of characters, which means that in addition to being your Greek font, you could use it as a whole-sale replacement for Times New Roman, or whatever default font you use in your documents—a one-stop shop for all your Latin-based language needs. Additionally, it is fully open (both “free beer” and “free speech”), and is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which is excellent. It includes installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as source code. The recent addition of GentiumAlt to the font family eliminates all my previous hesitations about recommending this font. It really is excellent, and its Latin characters are so nice that I have begun using it as my default serif font for all my documents.  Gentium is maintained by SIL, which has developed quite a reputation among linguists, and promises robust future development while maintaining an open licensing schema. (By the way, if you are using Ubuntu/Debian Linux, you can install from the command line: “sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium”.)
• Galatia SIL is a serif font that uses a half-moon circumflex. It is “free beer” but not “free speech.” This is a slight problem because the font no longer appears to be actively developed, which is unfortunate because it is probably the best-looking Greek font available. A font that is no longer supported by those that made it can be problematic because errors will not get fixed, and errors might crop up as the rest of the computer world marches on.
• Freefont. I have not had much experience with this font. It’s biggest claim to fame is its audacity: the goal of the project is to support every unicode character, which is pretty ambitious. It looks nice and is licensed under the GNU (pronounced GooNoo) public license, the best and original “copy-left” license. You can check out more information on the project here.
• Linux Libertine and other OpenType fonts are available for Linux and other operating systems, including Windows, despite the name. A good choice. Fully open. But they are not the prettiest fonts available, and I’ve had issues with software compatibility (such as exporting a document to PDF).
• Other SIL fonts. The Summer Institute of Linguistics specializes in languages, translations, and technological tools. There are many fonts available on their site, most of which provide Unicode support, many of which are licensed under their OFL. If you are in search of a different Greek font, or a font for a non-Latin character set (coptic, Hebrew, etc.), this is the place to start.
• The Free Font Foundation has several Unicode fonts that are worth checking out.
• Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are not yet ready to deploy, as they do not yet support Greek characters. Nevertheless, they are the next “upgrade” to the wonderful Gentium font family, listed above. Gentium only builds regular and italic glyph-sets into its definition: no additional weights are included. This is not a problem for basic users; almost all Word Processors are able to automatically “add” bold weighting to any font, regardless of its internal definition (at least that is my understanding—I am able to get great-looking bold characters with the regular Gentium fonts listed above). Publishing companies, by contrast, will not want to rely on a particular Word Processor’s interpretation of a font, and will therefore require additional “built in” weights. So, to make up for this deficiency, SIL has split Gentium development. Both Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are based on the Gentium glyph-set, but will include bold-weight characters, as well as some other features not included in the original Gentium (again, this is my understanding of their explanation, and I invite correction from anyone with more accurate knowledge). They do not yet support Polytonic Greek, however, though eventually they will support every character that Gentium supports. Keep an eye on these; when they are finished they could supply the biblical scholar and publisher with all their Latin-based-character needs.
• Still looking? While the above fonts are, in my judgment, the best available, there are others. The above link provides some additional online resources. This site might also come in handy, though some of the fonts listed are either terrible or not free in any sense.
• SBL has an collection of legacy fonts available at their site, none of which are included in the above lists due to their non-open license, and also because only a few of them include Unicode support.

What about Hebrew?

I have given short-shrift to Hebrew, and I apologize. There are reasons, however. There really is only one decent open-standard font that I know about for Biblical Hebrew: Ezra SIL. It’s fully open under SIL’s OFL, it supports every character used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and it’s easy on the eyes. You will need to download a special keyboard to get it working, though. Instructions for doing so are available on the download page, where you can also find a keyboard map of the layout. Also: you may run into small problems with Macs and in Linux, though nothing catastrophic. If anyone has other Hebrew fonts they would like to recommend, please do so in the comments.

Ros Clarke notes in one of the comments that SBL has a good Hebrew font available here. It is a very well designed font that includes Linux support. The only disadvantage is that it is not licensed under an open standard, though SBL does provide it free of charge for non-commericial use. Thanks Ros.

Conclusion

Don’t forget to check out my previous posts on Unicode and on setting up a Greek keyboard. All this might sound a bit intimidating, but it really will make your life easier in the long run.

Related posts:

1. How to Type in Greek Part II: Setting Up the Microsoft Greek Polytonic Keyboard
2. How to Type in Greek Part I: An Introduction to Unicode
3. How to Type in Greek Part IV: Polytonic Greek, Linux Edition (Ubuntu)
4. Type in Polytonic Greek in Linux
5. SBL’s Unicode Greek Font Finally Released!

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