SBL’s Unicode Greek Font Finally Released!

It’s been a long time coming, but SBL has finally released their promised Greek Font. The download page is here, or you can download it directly here. There is also a Hebrew font.

The fonts work in all Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Mac). They are not open-source (so a couple of other fonts are still my top recommendations), but they are free to use:

SBL fonts are made available without cost to individual scholars for non-profit use. Commercial use by publishers is reserved for members of the SBL Font Foundation.

If you haven’t already set up your keyboard to support Unicode Greek, follow my guide (for Macs go here, or for Linux here).

SBL’s Biblical Font FAQ is also worth a read. If you’re not already familiar with the advantages of Unicode (as described, for example, in my guide), you may find their explanation of interest:

Why should I bother with a Unicode font? Isn’t it easier to keep using the fonts I have used for years?

With older, non-Unicode fonts, character glyphs were simply mapped over Roman characters. So, with SPEzra for example, pushing “b” displays a bet, and “[” displays an ayin. However, the computer understands these characters as “b” and “[.” Thus, when the document is transferred to a computer that does not have that specific font installed, the computer displays those characters.

Unicode seeks to allow for transfer of encoded documents between platforms and independent of fonts. So, if a document is typed using one Unicode font, it will also be viewable using another Unicode font. Likewise if the font is not installed, the computer simply defaults to its normal Unicode font. If one wants to use a different font for aesthetic (or other) reasons, one can change the font just like one would do with English. Additionally, the computer understands the characters to be the ones that the screen displays. So, an ayin both displays as an ayin and is encoded that way. This makes cross-platform text transfers and searches possible, because texts can be encoded with the characters in which they are written. Even though learning to switch to and use keyboard layouts for other languages takes a little bit of time to learn, the benefits of Unicode more than make up for this small initial investment of time and effort.

HT: Rod Decker

Related posts:

1. New Unicode Greek Font with Text-Critical Glyphs
2. How to Type in Greek Part I: An Introduction to Unicode
3. New Polytonic Greek Font
4. Convert Non-unicode text to Unicode
5. Amarok 2 (Finally) Released

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