[B-Greek] B-Greek Better fonts to use with Unicode

Roman Caceres rc.info at fjclink.com
Mon Mar 17 21:55:44 EDT 2008


Hello,
Bert, the answer you received makes perfect sense. I was suspicious about it 
and finally I confirmed that Arial does NOT have a GREEK EXTENDED Unicode 
character subset. So, when you are using Arial and typing diacritical marks, 
a different font is used only for those characters. That is why they look 
different, because they ARE different.

Tahoma and many others include the GREEK EXTENDED subset, that is why they 
look fine.

George, you can personally verify what is been said. If you are using MS 
Word, please type some text using Arial font and go to:

Insert / Symbol:
Choose Font: Arial
Look for the Greek Extended subset... IT IS MISSING. I know it is hard to 
believe.... but try the same with Tahoma, the subset will be there.

Well, the good news:  I found a solution for the problem when using Outlook 
Express.

B-Greek list does not support html emails, all are converted to plain text. 
So, the text you received has no format. But it has an ENCODING.

As you know, Unicode is NOT a font, is an encoding system. That is why it 
really does not matter what font you use to write an email. The issue is the 
font that is used to READ an email, and this can be changed for a different 
one of your preference when you received an plain text email.

If you are using Outlook Express, you can change the default font from Arial 
to Tahoma:

Options / Read / Fonts:
Proportional Font: Tahoma
Encoding: UTF-8

And the problem is solved. It may take time to get accustomed to read a 
different font, but it works!!

I hope this is useful.

In Christ,
Roman Caceres

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George F Somsel" <gfsomsel at yahoo.com>
To: "Bert de Haan" <dehaanaf at gmail.com>; <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 6:45 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] B-Greek Better fonts to use with Unicode


I hate to have to disagree with whoever told you that, but I have a number 
of polytonic Greek fonts on my computer including Arial Unicode MS, Titus 
Cyberbit Basic, Gentium, Cardo, SIL Galatia, New Athena Unicode, BibliaLS, 
KadmosU, Palatino Linotype, Porson and probably a few I don't immediately 
remember.  Arial Unicode MS is one of the most complete fonts there are.  I 
have only noticed that it is missing a lower case digamma which becomes 
noticeable if I use it for my Greek resources in Logos in which case certain 
words in LSJ have a rectangle rather than a character.  Switching to another 
font such as BibliaLS or KadmosU solves the problem.  This is NOT due to a 
font using a character from another set.

george
gfsomsel

… search for truth, hear truth,
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth,
defend the truth till death.


 - Jan Hus
_________

----- Original Message ----
From: Bert de Haan <dehaanaf at gmail.com>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 8:27:01 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] B-Greek Better fonts to use with Unicode

Like you noticed, they all look the same in the b-greek email and all
the letters have the the same height.
When I look at the same message in the archives each line is the same
again but every letter with a diacritic is higher.
I had the same problem with Perseus.
I asked about it and received an answer from a knowledgeable
computer/greek geek.  Here is the question and the answer I received.
Maybe it'll help you:


(Q)On the computer I used to have I had the font display for Perseus
set at SPIonics.
Now I have it on Unicode. Something is not right though. When I have
it set for the unicode with precombined accents, all letters with a
diacritical mark of any kind shows up bigger.......... .....

(A)That means the default font for your browser doesn't actually have
the full polytonic set, and is grabbing precombined characters from
some other font.......

Bert de Haan

> From: "Roman Caceres" <rc.info at fjclink.com>
> To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:02:46 -0600
> Subject: [B-Greek] Better fonts to use with Unicode
> Hello all,
>
> I've been trying with different fonts for use with Unicode.
> Arial is not very nice because it has diferent heights for characters with 
> diactritical marks:
>
> (Arial) Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...
>
> Other fonts work better, such as:
>
> (Gentium) Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...
>
> (Tahoma) Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...
>
> (Palatino Lynotype) Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...
>
> I hope this is useful.
>
> Roman
>
> _______________________________________________
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
>
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