This is a test page meant to show you how various characters will appear if you have the Greek font properly installed in your system.

As of this writing, the following Unicode fonts support polytonic Greek:

1. New Athena Unicode (also AttikaU, KadmosU, and BosporosU) (American Philological Association c/o Donald Mastronarde: Freeware). This is an adjusted version of Athena Unicode, distributed with the Greekkeys Unicode package. [Download (MAC and PC)]. [see sample page ]
2. Antioch (Vusillus Old Face, Vusilius) [PC] [MAC] (Ralph Hancock: Shareware). The Vusillus Old Face font allows the display of Unicode classical Greek in the OSX operating system. Registered users of Antioch also gain access to eight other polytonic fonts. (The shareware Vusillus Old Face is italic. Vusillus is available in regular and italic) [see sample page]
3. Γραμματοσειρές Unicode No 2 (Unicode Fonts No 2); Γραμματοσειρές Unicode No 3 (Unicode Fonts No 3); Γραμματοσειρές Unicode No 5 (Unicode Fonts No 5) [PC] (Magenta: Commercial). (MgOldTimes UC Pol is available in the demo version of Magenta's Polytonistis [Accentuator] software; MgAvantG UC Pol, MgChanceryBeauty UC Pol and MgGreekArchaic UC Pol are available in the demo version of Magenta's Ancient Greek-Modern Greek & Modern Greek-Ancient Greek electronic translation dictionary). (Magenta fonts are available in plain, italic, bold, and bold italic.)
4. Code 2000 [PC] (James Kass: shareware). [Download]. [see sample page]
5. TITUS Cyberbit Basic [PC] (Bitstream & TITUS Project: free to non-commercial users only). [see sample page]
6. Cardo [PC] (David Perry: Free for non-commercial use.) [Download]. [see sample page]
7. Caslon [PC] (George Williams: GNU General Public License). Also available in Unix version. [Download]. [see sample page]
8. Monospace [PC] (George Williams: GNU General Public License). This is a monospace (typewriter) font, so you can use it in your browsers to type Greek with (including accents.) (Available in plain, italic and boldface.) [Download]. [see sample page]
9. Legendum and Garogier [PC] (Rogier van Dalen: freeware/GNU General Public License) [Download]. [see sample page]
10. Silver Humana [PC] (Silver Mountain Software: Included in TLG Workplace and Silver Fonts pack: shareware).
11. Palatino [PC] (Microsoft: commercial), included in Windows 2000, contains Unicode polytonic Greek. (Available in normal, italic, bold, bold italic.) [see sample page]
12. Arial Unicode MS [PC] (Monotype: commercial), included in Office 2000, contains Unicode polytonic Greek. [see sample page]
13. Lucida Sans Unicode [PC] (Bigelow & Holmes: commercial), included in all versions of Windows, contains Unicode polytonic diacritics, though not polytonic precomposed characters.
14. Lucida Grande [MAC] (Bigelow & Holmes: commercial), included with MacOSX (from version 10.2, "Jaguar", onwards), contains Unicode polytonic Greek. (Available in plain and boldface.) [see sample page]
15. Arial, Helvetica, Times [MAC] (Microsoft/Apple/Linotype: commercial), included with MacOSX (from version 10.4, "Tiger", onwards), contains Unicode polytonic Greek. (Available in plain, boldface, italic, bold italic.) [example (Helvetica) example (Times)]
16. Minion Pro [PC] (Adobe: commercial). This is the first OpenType Greek polytonic font, meaning it includes variant glyphs; for example, alternative rendering of capital adscripts as adscripts and subscripts. (Available in normal, italic, bold, bold italic.)
17. Andron Mega Corpus (Andreas Stötzner: commercial). The Andron Mega package contains more than 12,000 glyphs in five seperate fonts: Regular, Italic, Semibold, Semibold italic and Regular small capitals. In addition, Andron Mega Regular features the entire new Coptic block.
18. Aisa Unicode [PC] (Stefan Hagel: freeware) included with MultiKey keyboard utility for entering Unicode characters into Windows. Excludes Latin script. [see sample page]
19. Porson [PC] (Greek Font Foundry: freeware). Beta version as of this writing. (Note that the Georgia Greek font, from the same developer, is no longer available.) [Download]. [see sample page]
20. jGaramond [PC] (Jan Thor: freeware). Based on Garamond; does not include adscripts. [Download]. (Available in normal, italic, and bold.)
21. Gentium [MAC] [PC] (Victor Gaultney: freeware). Intended to promote fine typography outside Western European languages. Future development of these fonts will be strongly influenced by the feedback given by users. Also available in Linux version. [Download (MAC)] [Download (PC)]. (Available in normal and italic.) [see sample page]
22. Alphabetum [PC] (Juan-José Marcos: commercial/demo). Intended for classicists and other scholars interested in Ancient languages in general (includes: Classical and Medieval Latin, Metrical Symbols, Old & Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, Runic, Ogham, Devanagari, Bengali, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Old Italic and Iberic scripts, and the IPA). Has an extensive user manual in both English and Spanish. [Download (demo)]. (Available in normal and italic.) [see sample page]
23. Tahoma [PC] ( Microsoft: Commercial). Polytonic Greek range included in version of Tahoma being distributed with Windows XP, but not in earlier versions.
24. Everson Mono Unicode [MAC] (Everson Typography: Shareware). The long-awaited monospace font from Michael Everson. [Download]. [see sample page]
25. FreeMono [PC] (Free UCS Outline Fonts, Primož Peterlin: Freeware). GNU Licensed monospace Unicode font. [Download]. (Available in normal, italic, bold, and bold italic.)
26. FreeSerif [PC] (Free UCS Outline Fonts, Primož Peterlin: Freeware). GNU Licensed serifed Unicode font. [Download]. (Available in normal, italic, bold, and bold italic.)
27. Galatia SIL [PC] (SIL International: Freeware). Created for use with Biblical Greek. [Download]. (Available in normal and bold.) [see sample page]
28. Aristarcoj [PC] (Russell Cottrell: Donationware). Contains a full complement of numerical symbols. Excludes Latin script. [Download]. [see sample page]
29. Galilee Unicode Gk [PC] (Rodney Decker: Free for non-commercial use). Sans-serif font, designed to complement Trebuchet, and intended for web browser use. [Download].
30. Hindsight Unicode [PC] (Darren Rigby: Freeware, CopyLeft). [Download]. [see sample page]
31. Chrysanthi Unicode [PC] (D. Paul Alecsandri: Freeware, Approval for commercial use). [Download].
32. Alkaios [PC, MAC] (Lucius Hartmann: Freeware). [Download: MAC, PC]. [see sample page]
33. Thryomanes Unicode [PC] (Hermann Miller: freeware). [Download] (Available in Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic) [see sample page]
34. Various fonts from the Greek Font Society (freeware) [see sample page]
35. Computer Modern Unicode (Andrey Panov: Freeware): CMU Bright, Classical Serif, Concrete, Sans Serif, Sans Serif Condensed, Serif Extra, Serif Upright Italic, Typewriter Text, Typewriter Text Variable Width. [Metafont, available for download as SFD, PFB, OTF] (Most fonts available in bold, italic and bold italic; wide range of variants) [see sample page]
36. MgOpen Canonica (EL/LAK / Magenta: freeware) [PC, Unix] Included with Debian GNU/Linux. [Download] (Available in plain, italic, bold, bold italic) [see sample page]
37. Arev Fonts (Tavmjong Bah: Freeware) In SFD and TTF format. Modification of Bitstream Vera fonts. (Available in plain, italic, bold, bold italic)
38. Deja Vu Fonts (Sourcforge team: Freeware) Modification of Bitstream Vera fonts. Available as TTF, SFD [Download] Bundled with Ubuntu Linux. Serif, Sans, and Sans Mono (Available in plain, italic, bold, bold italic; wide range of variants)
39. CERG Chinese Font (DynaComware/Research Grants Council, Hong Kong: copyright, freeware) [Download] [see sample page]
40. Gandhari Unicode (Andrew Glass: freeware) Font primarily for transliteration of Indic languages [Download] (Available in plain and italic)
41. LeedsUni (Alec McAllister; freeware) developed for the Medieval Unicode Font Initative. Version 2.0. forthcoming. [see sample page]
42. Linux Libertine Open (Philipp Poll: freeware) Serif and Sans Serif fonts [Download] (Available in plain, italic, bold, bold italic)
43. Old Standard [PC; TrueType and OpenType] (Alexey Kruykov; Open Font License). Fonts included with the Thessalonica text utility. Old Standard is modelled on the Modern style current in the 19th century. [Download Open Type] (available in plain, italic) [see sample page]
44. Theano [PC; TrueType and OpenType] (Alexey Kryukov; Open Font License). Didot, Modern (Porson), and Old Style fonts (with ligatures). [Download Open Type, Download True Type, Download Open Type] [see sample page]
45. Tempora LGC Unicode [PC; TrueType and OpenType] (Alexey Kruykov; GNU Copyleft). Fonts included with the Thessalonica text utility. Times-based design. [Download Open Type] (available in plain, italic, bold, bold italic) [see sample page]
46. Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts [PC; OpenType] (George Douros; "free for any use"). Several fonts for symbols, including Ancient Greek and Byzantine Musical Notation; and Alexander, an 18th century style font, with ligatures. [Download] (available in plain) [see sample page]
47. Segoe UI [PC; TrueType] (Microsoft; commercial). Sans-serif font, available in Vista. (available in plain, italic, old, bold italic) [see sample page]
48. Kerkis [PC & Unix; LaTeX, X11, TrueType, OpenType] (University of the Aegean; copyright). Can be used in Unix and PC/Mac. [Download LaTeX, X11, TrueType, OpenType] (available in plain serif, plain sans-serif; other faces available only in monotonic) [see sample page]
49. SBL Greek [PC; TrueType] (Society of Biblical Literature; free for non-profit use, commercial use only for society members). Can be used in Unix and PC/Mac. [Download] (available in plain) [see sample page]
50. Junicode (in beta) [PC; TrueType] (Peter Baker) is a Unicode font for medievalists. and currently contains 5870 characters in the regular style (the italic, bold and bold italic styles are less complete). [Download] [see sample page]
51. IFAOGrec [PC; TrueType] (Institut français d'archéologie orientale, free use with attribution) is a Greek and Coptic font which contains the most important critical and diacritical signs, and the sigla and symbols used in editing papyrological and epigraphical texts, as well as Greek texts of specialized content such as mathematics, astronomy, magic, music, and poetry. [Download] [see sample page]
52. Brill [PC; TrueType] (Brill; free for non-commerical use) is a font for humanities scholars with complete coverage of the Latin script, Greek, and Cyrillic. [Download] [see sample page]

Unix solutions include the Caslon and Computer Modern Unicode fonts, cited above, and the ClearlyU BDF Font (Mark Leisher: freeware) [Download]. TrueType fonts will install successfully on Linux; see the Corefonts project for one way of doing so.

We have excluded from this listing as impractical fonts which have only a partial implemetation of Greek Extended.

There is some discussion of setup issues on our Font Configuration page. See also:

• James Kass' page detailing the current problems involved in Unicode display with Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape.
• P. T. Rourke's page on Unicode Greek on the Web for a demonstration and discussion of polytonic Greek Unicode.
• Donald Mastronarde's discussion of Unicode Greek and Mac OS X.
• David Perry's Fonts for Scholars page, including discussion of issues specific to Unicode for Classics.
• Alan Wood's Unicode and Multilingual Resources.
• David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts.
• Simos Xenitellis' Greek Font Resources. (in Greek)
• Dimitri Marinakis' Hellenic Polytonic Howto (GNU/Linux)
• Nick Nicholas' Greek Unicode Issues site.
• The Unicode Consortium home page for general information on Unicode.

Display

To guarantee optimal display, we use the precomposed Unicode polytonic combinations, where available (Normalization Form C), rather than combining diacritics (Normalization Form D). For example, A)/ is displayed as the single character ἄ (ἄ), not the combined characters ἄ (ἄ). The two Unicode strings are definitionally entirely equivalent, and it is the Operating System's job to render the latter as the former. The World Wide Web Consortium recommends the use of Normalization Form C for World Wide Web documents.

Test characters

The repertoire of characters required to support TLG text display is still inconsistent from platform to platform and from font to font. In the following, we have listed likely problem characters, and their absence in the fonts we have had access to (Aisa, Alexander, Alkaios, Alphabetum, Antioch, Arial, Aristarcoj, Athena Unicode, Brill, Cardo, Caslon, CERG, Code 2000, Chrysanthi Unicode, Computer Modern, DejaVu, Everson Mono Unicode, FreeMono, FreeSerif, Galatia SIL, Galilee Unicode Gk, Gandhari, Gentium, Greek Font Society fonts, IFAOGrec, jGaramond, Junicode, KadmosU, Kerkis, LeedsUni, Linux Libertine, Lucida Grande, Magenta, MgOpen Canonica, Monospace, New Athena Unicode, Old Standard, Palatino, Porson, SBL Greek, Silver Humana, Tahoma, Tempora, Times, Thryomanes, TITUS Cyberbit). As will be noted, different fonts have different coverage, and users will have to compromise between aesthetics and coverage in picking their font. (The two do not inherently go together!)

As a general comment, proper display of TLG texts requires characters not only from the Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, Greek, and Greek Extended character sets, but also punctuation and editorial signs to be found in the General Punctuation, Arrows, Mathematical Operators, Miscellaneous Technical, Miscellaneous Symbols, and CJK Symbols and Punctuation sets. (The latter, though nominally Chinese punctuation, includes the double square brackets [4, ]4 (deletion brackets), which occur around 5000 times in the corpus.) Character sets and browsers may have difficultly finding many of these characters; however, the problem is not Unicode's in such instances, and it would be improper to devise workarounds (such as, for example, displaying double brackets as [[ ]]) while work is continuing on fully implementing Unicode standards. The TLG search engine also cannot take account of erroneously rendered glyphs such as Palatino's U+1FEC (Capital Rho with rough breathing, rendered as having a smooth breathing.)

Note also that some systems (notably MacOSX) are quite good at retrieving symbols from different fonts if the current selected font does not have the required character.

Because the recent additions to Unicode are incorporated in very few fonts, we have divided our listing into pre-Unicode 4.0 and Unicode 4 onwards.

Pre-Unicode 4.0

Unicode 4.0 onwards

This text should have an overbar.
This text should have an underline.
This text should be expanded.
This text should be condensed.
This text should be in small caps.

This is how your browser renders the beginning of the Iliad in HTML 4:
1.1.1.
(1.)