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
10/04/07 Email address
has changed! See the contacts page for my new address. Update your address book, if you have stored
my old address.
1/10/07 Work on Cardo and other font issues has
been suspended due to a time-consuming textbook project. This project will be completed by the fall of
2008 , at which point development of Cardo will resume. You may continue to email me with simple
questions about Cardo, but it will not be possible to add any new characters or
proceed with the italic and boldface versions until the textbook is done. I regret this but the textbook must take
precedence for a while.
11/15/06 Proposals for Roman epigraphical letters
and signs as well as an update of the earlier proposal for Roman weights and
monetary signs accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee. Good news!
7/16/06 Draft proposal
for additional Roman characters posted (PDF file, 2 megabytes due to large
number of scanned examples). Comments
needed by July 30 so that the proposal can be considered at the August 8
meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee.
These are mainly characters of interest to epigraphers (centurial sign,
I longa, etc.). You can skip the first
two pages, which are a cover sheet.
6/29/06 The proposal to Unicode for Roman
weight and coin symbols was generally well received at the May meeting of
Unicode Technical Committee, but some of the committee members had questions
about the advisability of encoding one character that has many forms that
differ greatly from each other. I have
prepared a paper that addresses this issue; comments
welcome.
6/13/06 Document dealing with issues regarding Roman numerals in Unicode posted.
5/08/06 Final version of the official proposal to Unicode for Roman weights and
monetary signs posted.
3/29/06 New page added dealing with proposals
to encode a number of characters needed by Latinists that are missing from
Unicode. If you are interested in this
project, please see this page.
3/20/06 I have finished a new version of Cardo that
includes a very large number of new characters in the MUFI recommendation
2.0. As soon as this recommendation is
finalized (late June, probably) I will issue an updated version of Cardo. Then back to work on the italic and bold
versions that I know people need!
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.
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. I just have not had time to do this.
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.
Using
the Supplementary Characters (Old Italic, Gothic, Acrophonic numerals, etc.)
I have been experimenting with
using the characters that have been added in Plane 1. I have posted a file here that explains how
to use these and other characters that are located in the Supplementary Planes
of Unicode. Click on this link to see the information on a web page or on this link to view a PDF version (see above for a link to get
Acrobat Reader). In short: support for
Plane 1 characters is a bit crude but does exist right now, if you are really
eager to try them. Word 2000 doesn’t
support them but Word XP does. Mac OS
10.2 handles them very nicely. I have
now added a PDF file that explains how
to add supplementary characters to a font.
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.
If
you want to add characters in the supplementary planes to your font, see this PDF file.
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
home page for
GreekKeys, with important information for Mac users—OS X 1.2 has
significant improvements in Unicode support that will make GreekKeys work much
better
·
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
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
Information about
multilingual fonts and Unicode
·
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 some Plane 1
characters and some Unicode ranges not in Cardo, such as Old Persian Cuneiform.
·
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
·
keyboards
for Gothic, Runic, and Ogham from Andrew West's homepage;
they require Windows NT/2000/XP.
·
the
excellent plain text editor Babel Pad
(for Windows; free) contains many features useful to those who need a variety
of Unicode characters is also 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).