Latin,
Germanic Languages,
Greek, Hebrew and Linguistics
Materials
compiled by David J. Perry
Rye High School,
Member, Educational Computer Applications
Committee,
American Classical League
These pages contain links to several files in
PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. For
information on getting the free Acrobat Reader, improving display quality, and
solving common problems with PDF files, go to this page.
recent updates
6/21/09 New version 1.4 of tutorial posted. If you need to use OpenType
features in your documents and are frustrated by lack of support in
applications, or are looking for a freely available alternative to commercial
publishing programs, check out XeTeX.
XeTeX is an extension of the typesetting language TeX, familiar to many
mathematicians and publishers but less widely used elsewhere. See this tutorial
which focuses on using XeTeX to create multilingual documents with OpenType
features. Also download this zip file with the samples. Version 1.4 adds more information about
creating Unicode text and extensive discussion of right to left text, plus
other small improvements.
6/21/09 Added a few new links and fixed some
broken ones.
5/10/09 Updated version of the complete list of characters for classical Latin
posted; includes significant additions in Unicode 5.0 and 5.1.
3/14/09 After a long hiatus due to a textbook
project and other things, a new version of the Cardo font is now in
preparation. It will contain some new
characters added in Unicode 5.1, be compliant with the MUFI spec 3.0, and
contain a few miscellaneous fixes. It
should be available late this spring.
My proposals for
ancient Roman characters in Unicode were accepted and the characters appear in
Unicode 5.1. For reference, the
proposals are now archived on this page.
3/28/05 I have posted a draft of a document
that surveys the current “state of the art” in regard to font technology and
application software. If you want to
know what word processors, page layout programs, and web browsers support
Unicode well and which ones support advanced font technologies such as OpenType
and AAT, you will find it useful. There
is also a section that describes the various technologies for those who need
that information as well as a list of currently available fonts. Mac OS, Unix, and Windows are all
covered. Download from this link.
New version (.8) posted on April 24.
3/14/09: this document needs updating, which
I will do sometime later this spring.
Click here
to go directly to the Cardo font page.
Scroll down for more information about other things this site has to offer.
introduction
Beginning in the
mid-1980s, as a classicist I encountered problems in finding fonts and keyboard
drivers that I need for Latin and Greek.
This has turned into a serious interest in fonts and related issues, especially
as they affect classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and others who
need to work in a variety of languages.
I am particularly interested in helping people understand and use the
Unicode Standard, which represents the future in multilingual computing and
which will address the needs of scholars.
On this page you
will find:
·
a book that provides detailed information about font issues
of concern to scholars
·
information about some of my own Unicode fonts and keyboard
drivers
·
help with displaying macrons on web pages and with using
characters in the Supplementary Planes of Unicode
·
links to the best scholarly fonts I have found and to other
sources of information
Email me with any questions or comments. Corrections or additional sources of
information are welcomed.
All the
materials on this page are available free, for the benefit of scholars and
teachers. I do have one request: if
you find these materials useful, please drop me an email and tell me about
how you have used them, and about improvements you would like to see.
information about
fonts and font-related issues
All
about fonts
I have put most
of what I have learned about fonts, keyboards, and related issues into a
booklet titled Word Processing in Classical Languages: Latin, Germanic,
Greek. This booklet provides
information about standard 256-character fonts as well as information about
Unicode and how this will help scholars use a larger repertoire of characters,
along with much other information. It is
written to be accessible to those who don’t have extensive knowledge of font
issues, but also contains material that will be of interest to those who are
experienced in this area. NOTE: this book is now seriously in need of
revision. The sections that deal with
basic Unicode concepts are still mostly valid, but the discussion of smart font
technologies and other issues must be updated.
A new version is now (May 2009) in preparation and will be available by
July.
You can download
a copy in Microsoft Word 97 format (zipped
for faster download) here; this version requires that you have the Cardo font
(see next paragraph) installed in order to display the tables and Unicode
examples properly. For Mac and Linux
folks, or for those who don’t have Word or don’t want to install the font, you
can download a PDF version here (also zipped;
even so, a large file ~800 KB).
A
Unicode font for classicists, biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists
Available from this page is information about, and a link to
download, the Cardo font. Cardo is a
large Unicode font specifically designed to meet the needs of classicists,
Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.
Unicode keyboard input: Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew
If you want to
use Unicode fonts and are looking for a convenient way to enter the characters,
look on this page that describes my
keyboards. See also the links below
under Greek and Hebrew for more options.
A font specially designed for Latin
teachers
If you want
macrons, metrical symbols, and epigraphical symbols for use in Latin teaching,
visit the homepage of the Classical
Association of the Empire State and check out CL Fonts. This is a standard 256 character font, not a
Unicode font, and so can be used by those who don’t have Unicode-capable word
processors. Both Mac and Windows
versions are available.
Displaying macrons on web pages
Special for
Latin teachers: how to get macrons on your web pages! Click here
for details.
Font Development Issues
A
PDF file discussing issues relating to the design of the Greek letter San/san
is posted here.
Comments are solicited on this topic.
LINKS TO OTHER FONT AND KEYBOARD RESOURCES
Greek
·
Patrick Rourke’s pages on Greek fonts and the web are
extremely useful and contain links to almost all the Unicode Greek fonts
currently available.
·
new The Greek Font
Society offers some very nice implementations of traditional designs for
Greek
·
home page for GreekKeys,
a widely used package for classical Greek now updated to version 2008
·
Dr. Rodney Decker of Baptist Bible Seminary has created the Galilee Greek font, a very
high quality sans-serif design which is optimized for use on the web and in
video projectors
·
Ralph Hancock’s Antioch utility
and fonts for Greek and Hebrew
·
A Unicode
version of the Porson font (used in the Oxford Classical Text series
and many other books)
·
Victor Gaultney’s Gentium font, a thoughtful new
design that supports the extended Latin blocks of Unicode as well as monotonic
and polytonic Greek and the IPA extensions block
·
the home page of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is linked here.
To go directly to their proposals for additional Unicode characters in
Greek, click this link.
Hebrew
·
SIL has now released a Unicode version of their excellent Ezra font (two
versions, actually, with different style cantillation marks) along with a
Keyman keyboard; it and many other fonts are available from this link.
Medieval
studies
·
the excellent Junicode
fonts from Peter Baker of the University of Virginia are available for Windows
and Mac OS X
·
the Edlund
fonts from Carl Anderson for Mac OS
·
the home page of the Medieval
Unicode Font Initiative
IPA /
Linguistics
·
John Wells maintains a list of Unicode fonts containing IPA
characters and offers help with using IPA characters on a web page at this web site
·
new SIL offers many
IPA keyboards for Unicode IPA fonts on this page
Information
about multilingual fonts and Unicode
·
new Linux Libertine
is a free, well designed font with a large character repertoire and many
OpenType features; it works on Windows and Mac as well as Linux.
·
James Kass is the author of the very useful Code 2000 and
Code 2001 fonts. The latter is
specifically designed to support the Plane 1 characters such as Old Italic,
Gothic, Aegean Numbers, and Cypriot Syllabary.
Here’s a link to his home page
which has lots of other font information as well.
·
Juan-José Marcos offers the Alphabetum font
(shareware) for classicists and medievalists; it includes a great many ancient
scripts.
·
Luc Devroye of McGill University maintains a very extensive
list of fonts and font-related items; it’s an excellent place to start if you
need a font. Click here for a link.
·
Alan Wood’s
Unicode Resources is
an outstanding site for finding out about things multilingual.
·
for a compelling demonstration of the power of Unicode to
display many languages in the same document, visit Tex Texin’s Unicode demo page,
which also has several useful links.
·
for the most up to date information about Unicode, visit the
web site of the Unicode Consortium.
Keyboards,
Font Viewers, and Editors
·
the excellent plain text editor Babel Pad
(for Windows; free) contains many features useful to those who need a variety
of Unicode characters by Andrew West.
·
another very good plain text Unicode editor is UniPad (Windows) from Sharmahd
Computing.
·
Mellel, a
word processor for Mac OS X that supports right to left text, OpenType
features, and other features useful to scholars
·
for Linux/Unix users, try the Yudit
editor for Unicode
·
Babel Map, a more sophisticated alternative to
Windows’s Character Map (the latter cannot yet handle characters in the
supplementary planes).