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Greek Ligatures
Vernon E Kooy has created a unique typeface with hundreds of ligatures that allows anyone to write Greek like a Renaissance scholar. It’s available exclusively here. Have a look.
Friday, 11 July 2008 :: {Tools} :: You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Erm, you’re really not supposed to map your own unrelated glyphs to Unicode ranges like Latin Extended-A - that’s what the Private Use Area is for. This will cause problems, for example, if someone has this font installed and uses a program like Firefox that automatically looks through the fonts on the system to display special characters - your font map is basically lying and saying it supports all these Latin characters when it will actually come out as Greek.
Ideally you’d want to do a font like this using automatic OpenType ligatures, but I can understand if you don’t have the software or ambition to implement that.
24 July 2008 @22:02
I don’t know whether it has something to do with what Justin mentioned in his comment but I am unable to install the font under Mac OSX 10.4.11. Well, I can install it but the Font Collection Utility warns me that there is a serious problem with the font (“Tabelle für die Schriftnamen” - in English probably something like “Table for Font Names”). As a result the font won’t appear in any application’s font menu nor can I access it with the Character Map Utility (I am able to open the font with Type Tool, though). I’d love to use RGeekL2 – it looks like a lot of work went into that typeface.
23 August 2008 @18:55
Hello,
Thanks a lot for making and distributing this font. It helped me a lot in deciphering several ligatures I found in a 17th century Greek book.
Kind regards,
Michel Pauw
Teacher of Classics at the Van Lodenstein College, Amersfoort, The Netherlands
21 May 2009 @9:10
While your font is certainly ambitious, it is ultimately disappointing. Because you mapped Greek glyphs to Latin slots, it is not possible to use with already-existing Greek texts (TLG, Perseus, etc.).
The old Beta-code you refer to is dead now. Unicode and Open Type are now widely used. I really cannot fathom why you did this, but to each their own I guess. But if your goal is for the font to gain “a modest distribution and not be a mere curiosity,” as you claim, you’ll need to modernize it and use proper Unicode and OTF tables.
However, your PDF is very useful for deciphering ligatures. Thanks!
17 April 2010 @8:25
I can’t even begin to thank you for your contribution.
Erroso filtate,
Efstathios egrafen
9 May 2010 @12:53
I tried to use the font in the manner suggested. It was time consuming.
I must agree with the comments of Rancher regarding the utility of the font.
I am a native Hellenic (not Greek please. This was the name given to Hellas after the Roman conquest in a masterstroke of psychological warfare to underline the fact that the decadent and weak inhabitants of Hellas of their time had nothing to do with the Hellenes of the past, but must have been the descendants of a backward tribe inhabiting the valley of Achelloos river the Graeci (see Suidas lemma Graikoi). The same thing was done to the Jews when Judea was renamed Palestine after the Philistines, the archrivals of the Jewish nation and Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina) speaker and writer and I would very much like to use the font in an easier way very much like the Old Vusillus font or other Hellenic fonts available.
The work on this font must go on and the end result must be a font that can be used in a cursory way with utilities included such as a document template and a small program that will enable the user to construct his/her own correspondence table.
The font is much too beautiful to be set aside because of ease of use problems.
28 July 2010 @14:33
It is really a great work (I haven’t found a more complete!!!), but unfortunately the mapping, as already mentioned, is not according to the greek keyboard and so someone cannot just apply this font on a greek text, and would need to rewrite it from the beginning with latin characters. I wonder if there is another version.
6 March 2011 @8:02