Unicode Greek Fonts

Like many people, I am always trying to find the right fonts for use in my academic writing.  The future is Unicode, as everyone except publishers (you know who you are) who still insist on SPIonic, recognizes. Up until now I have made use of Cardo, not least because it has full Hebrew and Greek functionality.  However the problems have always been that:
1.  I use Word 2004 for most of my writing, and the right to left Hebrew support is absent (and yes I know the answer is to use Mellel, but Mellel doesn't work with EndNote).
2.  I have never been happy with the aesthetics of Cardo.  It looks OK on its own but doesn't seem to work well with TimesNewRoman.

So, what a joy to have two new possibilities for a Greek Unicode font arriving in the last couple of weeks.  Here is a comparative view of Philippians 1.3-5

Arial Unicode
Εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου ἐπὶ πάσῃ τῇ μνείᾳ ὑμῶν  4 πάντοτε ἐν πάσῃ δεήσει μου ὑπὲρ πάντων ὑμῶν, μετὰ χαρᾶς τὴν δέησιν ποιούμενος,  5 ἐπὶ τῇ κοινωνίᾳ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης ἡμέρας ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν

Cardo
Εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου ἐπὶ πάσῃ τῇ μνείᾳ ὑμῶν  4 πάντοτε ἐν πάσῃ δεήσει μου ὑπὲρ πάντων ὑμῶν, μετὰ χαρᾶς τὴν δέησιν ποιούμενος,  5 ἐπὶ τῇ κοινωνίᾳ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης ἡμέρας ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν 

IFAOGrec
Εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου ἐπὶ πάσῃ τῇ μνείᾳ ὑμῶν  4 πάντοτε ἐν πάσῃ δεήσει μου ὑπὲρ πάντων ὑμῶν, μετὰ χαρᾶς τὴν δέησιν ποιούμενος,  5 ἐπὶ τῇ κοινωνίᾳ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης ἡμέρας ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν

SBL Greek
Εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου ἐπὶ πάσῃ τῇ μνείᾳ ὑμῶν  4 πάντοτε ἐν πάσῃ δεήσει μου ὑπὲρ πάντων ὑμῶν, μετὰ χαρᾶς τὴν δέησιν ποιούμενος,  5 ἐπὶ τῇ κοινωνίᾳ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης ἡμέρας ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν, 

I'm sorry, but from a very simplistic point of view the new SBL font looks like something from the 19th century.  I am going to go for the IFAO Grec from now in when using Unicode Greek.

Comments

[Jeremy]

Sean -- you may be interested in the Greek Font Society. They have a nice selection of typefaces to use -- free. It is http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/pages/en_about.html -- "typefaces" in the menu.

[Catriona]

It's all unicode to me... ;-)

What I see in Firefox is as Bob states but suspect that's down to what's on my steam driven PC as much as anything?

Glad you're back in blogland it's been a bit too quiet of late. I'm sure the likes of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza would have something to say about the 'power of naming' your blog too.

Hope all is well with your antipodean adventure

[Doug Chaplin]

Er … if people don't have the font on their computer, it won't show up in this post. So I've got one example of Arial and three of IFAO Greek.

My personal preference currently is for Minion Pro.

[SteveH]

One name change, and five posts in a day?!

I quite like Cardo, actually - the GK and Heb scripts, and the Roman. The answer to your aesthetic problem, of course, is to stop using TNR. As I say, the Cardo Roman is fine, but go for Garamond, a beautiful font originally designed in the 1540s and used by Apple in the original Mac branding.

[Bob Almond]

Hmmmm.... Maybe it's just Internet Explorer, but those are all the same when I look at them. (just checked - IE displays all 4 the same, Firefox displays the first differently, the other three the same) I think that you might need to embed an image, rather than hope that the fonts make their way succesfully across the interweb.