Polytonic Greek fonts to go with Venetians? John Hudson?

charles ellertson1 May 2012

We have a long-time customer that is aiming to expand their format designs for their classical literature series. They have one design that works well, using Garamond Premier Pro. Minion would work for the same reason, but I'm curious about having a Venetian -- say Bembo Book or Espinosa Nova -- available. Not just any Venetian, but one with thick enough fine lines to print well offset, with current workflows.

Problem is, I can't find a Greek that I think mates well. I tried Carter's Wilson Greek, but no joy. Please don't say Porson -- it does work, but Porson's capital-lower-case sizing is a nightmare. Anyway, Porson ... see below.

A second issue is that it would be nice to have a Greek family with both a "roman" and an "italic/inclined." Not exactly the way Greek fonts are often packaged, but the presence of a bibliography in a book, with modern source material published in Greece, makes the need for a "roman" and "italic" or "inclined" very desireable.

Any thoughts?

TIA,

charles

John Hudson1 May 2012#

There's the SBL Greek, but its in one style and weight only. For commercial use, you'd need to get a license from SBL, but the font can be downloaded for non-commercial use and testing:
http://sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLGreek.aspx

hrant1 May 2012#

I'm no expert, but I like Apollonia.
http://www.fonts.gr/en/fonts/category/Text/Apollonia
http://www.linotype.com/865831/Apollonia-family.html
BTW since you're into tweaking fonts, if you use it please do give the eta a descender.

hhp

DTY2 May 2012#

I suppose you've already considered Arno Pro. GFS Neohellenic has both upright and inclined styles. I'm not so sure it could be said to pair well with something like Bembo, but historically it's based on pre-Aldine Venetian Greek type. GFS Complutum is perhaps a nicer example of the style, but it doesn't have an inclined.

Nick Shinn2 May 2012#

The antithesis of Venetian, but my Scotch Modern does have a proper italic (i.e. one with a different construction to the roman, not merely slanted). Its Greek italic also has a different construction than the Latin italic†, which provides useful contrast in settings such as this:

Scotch Modern has a Micro size, suitable for footnotes, and all features (small caps, polytonic, swash, alternates, &c.) are available in all scripts, weights and optical sizes.

†The idea being that italic is inherently cursive in nature, with cursivity being represented in the Latin italic by pothook serifs, and in the Greek italic by the traditional Greek organic/chirographic look with its irregular Baroque stress (Bringhurst’s terminology).

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL