I asked the question here. The answer, perhaps, is available here. An excerpt:
Up until last night, the person with the most followers on the micro-messaging service was Digg founder and Web celeb Kevin Rose
, with 56,482 other people following his every public mind burp. It took none other than Barack Obama
If you use Openoffice.org or run a Linux operating system, saving any document as a PDF is easy. There is also a plugin for recent versions of Microsoft Office that can do this. But what about exporting web pages, or documents created by other software? For this you will need a “Print to PDF” driver. A “Print to PDF” Driver works exactly like any other printer, only instead of actually printing your document it generates a PDF in a folder of your choosing. This is very easy to set up: here are the details.
Linux provides the same functionality. Most distributions include a driver that does this: just go to your printer settings dialog, “Add” a printer, and look for an entry like “Print to PDF.” I’m sure MAC users have something similar, so perhaps one of our MAC readers could post a comment regarding how to set that up.
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:
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”.)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.
According to Google Analytics, at least 5 people downloaded Firefox 3 due to my post. Apparently, however, my contribution to Firefox’s World Record was fairly meager. The fabled Colbert Bump had far more impact. The Mozilla Foundation (the company behind Firefox 3) has provided precise measurements of the effects of the Bump, but are apparently not the first to do so.
Included here is a video of the Bump in action, or you can go directly to Colbert’s site.
Has this ever happened to you? You’ve spent a lot of work typing out a paper, or preparing some notes on the Bible, or posting some thoughts on a blog, and like a good little Greekling, you made sure to stick to the original languages. Now you want to share your efforts, either by distributing your paper (say, sending it to a professor by email), or publishing it on the web. Well, you might have a problem. If you did not use Unicode when typing Greek, your quotation of John 3:16 may look like this:
ou[twj ga.r hvga,phsen o` qeo.j to.n ko,smon(
Why does this happen? Well, it happens because you are using an ASCII-based font. What does that mean? Before 1997, most fonts were ASCII fonts; they were fonts that represented characters using an 8-bit system. A bit is either a 1 or a 0. An 8-bit number is a string of 8 ones and/or zeroes. When you use an ASCII font, each 8-bit number represents a different character: 00000001 is “a”, 00000010 is “b”, etc. The problem? An 8-bit number can only represent 256 characters (2 to the power of 8). 
Remember Zelda? He could only carry 255 coins because the NES was an 8-bit system, and could therefore only count to 255 (0 counts as a number).
So the problem is, in order to type in foreign languages we need more characters. 256 is plenty for most European languages, but when you add Mandarin, Hebrew, or Greek into the equation, you will have problems. Your ASCII Greek font gets around this by mapping Greek glyphs onto English characters. A glyph is the particular representation of a character. “A” “a” “a” and “a” are different glyphs of the same character: the first letter of the English alphabet. Since ASCII cannot represent every character in every language, it just changes the glyph to match the language in question and then maps those glyphs on English characters. So your ASCII Greek font is tricking the computer. You see θέος, but the computer sees y’eow. It thinks you are writing in English, not Greek. And the problem is: the computer is right.
Now that ASCII Greek font will work fine in a lot of cases, but what if you ever want to change the font in your paper? There are many reasons to do so. You find a font you like better. You want to distribute your paper to people that might not have access to your font. You want to post it online where is will be viewed with who knows what font. Bottom line: if reading your paper depends on a particular font, you’re in trouble. And if you ever do decide to change fonts, you’re out of look: the only way is to retype all that beautiful Greek.
Or you could use Unicode from the beginning. Unlike ASCII, Unicode supports up-to 32 bits (there are different subsets, but there’s no need to bother with that). That’s 4,294,967,296 possible slots, which is more than enough to support every character in every language. That’s the bottom line: Unicode lets us type out characters, not glyphs, so we don’t have to trick the computer. We can tell the computer from the beginning that we want to type in Greek–ancient Greek, to be precise–and the computer will respond accordingly. All major Word Processors support Unicode, as do most browsers. Its the standard, and you should use it.
So how do you set it up? Good question. The answer: if you’re using any modern Operating System (Windows 98 and after, any Mac, any Linux), it’s already running. Times New Roman is a Unicode font, and you can use it to type in Greek and Hebrew (though its not very pretty). The problem is, most of our systems assume we only want to type in English. We need to tell our system that we are smarter than it gives us credit, that we know Greek and will sometimes be typing in Greek. There is complicated, expensive, and bloated software out there on the web to help you do this, but they’re completely unnecessary. Windows (and Linux and Apple) can do it, and it’s not difficult. You just need to change a few settings, which we’ll do together (with pictures!) next post. And I’ll also provide some good open-standard font suggestions.
As a practical note, many of us simply copy and paste from our Bible software. For me, it’s Bibleworks, though the Perseus Project has the entire Greek bible online, and in Unicode. Bibleworks prior to version 7, for reasons I cannot fathom, did not support Unicode. Bibleworks 7 provides such support, but it is, for reasons I cannot fathom, not enabled by default.
This is easy to change, however. Just go to “Tools” -> “Options” and click on the “Fonts” tab. Click “Export Fonts,” which will provide you with two boxes you can check. Check them, and you’re good to go. Now whenever you copy and paste from Bibleworks 7, it will export the text in Unicode. Finally, your readers will know the truth, regardless of their fonts:
οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ᾽ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
More to come, and hope this helps.
One question I get a lot is “how do I keep up with my Greek?” At the risk of over-simplification, my answer is… wait for it… read Greek!
Lee Irons has a variety of resources on his site to make such reading less intimidating for the beginner to intermediate Greekling. To get started, check out his introduction to his reading program. You will also want to download his more detailed Greek Reading Calendar. Most importantly, pick up a copy of his Greek Syntax Notes, which he promises to distribute in installments throughout the year.
Also, I highly recommend Young’s Intermediate NT Greek, which is concise. comprehensive, linguistically-aware, and easy to use. All together, it is an excellent reference that should be on everyone’s bookshelf, and will be enormously helpful in those tough-to-read sections.
Finally, I am making some of my beginner Form and Function guides available here. They are still a work in progress, and only cover the basics of Greek syntax, but they can serve as a good resource for reminding you of what you already know. These are highly indebted to Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek, Machen/McCartney’s NT Greek for Beginners and Young’s aforementioned Greek grammar (many of the terms of several of the guides have been directly lifted from the last two of these, since they are both used in my Greek class).
Stay tuned! I plan on posting a variety of Greek resources in the near future, including a guide to typing in Greek and an introduction to diagramming with Bibleworks. So if you haven’t subscribed to the site, do so!
