SBL presentation/font info query
Peter Kirk
Peter_Kirk at sil.org
Thu Nov 8 11:18:37 EST 2001
SBL presentation/font info queryDear Rodney,
I think that your paper needs some serious rethinking. You have failed to
distinguish between four significantly different and independent issues: 1.
the encoding of the Greek characters within the computer, and for storage
and transfer; 2. the keyboard layout and input method used to generate that
encoding; 3. the rendering method used to map that encoding on to the glyphs
in a font; and 4. the font itself, in the sense of the set of glyphs.
Unicode deals with point 1, and is cross-platform. Actually it is not now
restricted to 2 bytes per character and allows more than a million
characters. In the past there have been many other encodings (mostly 8-bit),
some e.g. beta code replacing Latin letters by Greek ones, others having
Greek characters in the "upper ASCII" range. In Unicode Greek, there is an
option between encoding each accented character decomposed into a base
character with separate accents or as a composed complex character; the
fully precomposed option (normalisation form C) is probably easier to work
with at present.
Keyman deals with point 2 only for Windows. It is essential to have some
such input method which matches the encoding. Beta code has the advantage
that it is supported by the standard western keyboard input methods, but
that leads to other problems. In Windows 2000 and XP there is a built-in
input method for polytonic Greek with Unicode encoding.
OpenType deals with point 3 only, again for Windows only. Such a rendering
method may be useful for Greek, but in fact the very simple rendering method
of standard TrueType fonts is adequate if text is stored as fully
precomposed Unicode. Also, most web browsers should be able to render
precomposed Unicode, although they may have problems with decomposed
characters.
You name many fonts and compare the merits of their various glyph shapes. I
will not comment on the shapes. But it is an essentially trivial task
(though it will need permission from the font copyright holder e.g. to remap
or to add OpenType tables) to use the glyphs of one font any encoding and
rendering method. I think you will be seeing more and more fonts with
existing glyph shapes but set up for Unicode encoding.
I also find it invidious that you have singled out the Mac for special
mention as supporting 256 characters. Many different operating systems,
including both DOS at least from very early days and Windows from the start,
have supported 256 (or at least 223) character fonts. The problem is that
each, including Mac, invented its own way of doing so and for a long time
there were no standards.
It is also untrue that "To date, almost all Greek fonts have functioned by
using English character keys but designing the font to display Greek
characters." I don't think this has ever been true of systems designed for
modern Greek. Back in the 1980s I was using a system (on the Amstrad PCW,
designed for modern Greek and adapted for polytonic) which used separate
code points for Greek and Latin scripts. Word Perfect was certainly doing
the same around 1990. Of course your statement is also inaccurate in that
fonts never use keys!
Peter Kirk
-----Original Message-----
From: Decker, Rodney [mailto:rdecker at bbc.edu]
Sent: 08 November 2001 01:30
To: Biblical Languages
Subject: [biblical-languages] SBL presentation/font info query
I am presenting a paper at SBL next week regarding the use of technology
in teaching (koine) Greek. I have briefly touched on some of the font
issues. I've included that section below (sans Greek font samples, etc.).
Other than opinions (of which you're welcome to differ! :) is there anything
inaccurate here? I'd be glad for any corrections if they are necessary.
===============================
One of the major problems with using modern technology to teach Greek is
with fonts. We are in a transitional time technologically and standards
continue to develop. Since computers have traditionally used a standard
typewriter-based keyboard there have been limited keys available. While
adequate for standard English text (though not for typesetting a full range
of printing characters), this is a severe limit for polytonic Greek. The
standard character set includes only 128 characters in "lower ASCII" (those
that can be directly accessed from the keyboard (shifted and unshifted
positions). The Macintosh allowed a greater character set (256 characters)
from the beginning of that operating system by enabling easy access to
"upper ASCII" characters with the option key, but even that has not proved
adequate.
The currently emerging standard is Unicode which allows tens of thousands
of characters in a single font, enabling for the first time both a complete
set of alphanumeric glyphs with other language-related typographical glyphs,
and, if desired, multiple language character sets-all of which can be
included in a single font file. [n33]
To date, almost all Greek fonts have functioned by using English character
keys but designing the font to display Greek characters. Thus the obvious
equivalents (such as alpha = a) have been used along with some less obvious
ones based on some similarity of appearance (e.g., omega = w; theta = q,
etc.). Diacritical marks have been a constant problem due to the need in
Greek for overstrike accents and breathing marks. This overstrike
("combining characters") approach works well in some software (word
processors), but displays very poorly in others-web browsers being a
critical problem area. For this, precomposed characters are the only good
solution, but since this requires a larger number of characters than is
available in the standard ASCII range, there has been no good solution until
the emergence of Unicode.
This still leaves open the problem of entering such characters since they
cannot be accessed directly from the keyboard. Two possible solutions are
available. The first is the use of a keyboard utility such as Tavultesoft's
Keyman <http://www.tavultesoft.com/>. I have not used such a utility, so I
cannot comment on its usefulness. The second is another new format that, if
I understand its potential correctly, may prove to be a better solution. The
new OpenType font format [n34] will allow a font designer to specify tables
of characters that automatically morph into a different character. For
example, an alpha followed by an acute accent would be automatically
remapped by the font to a different character above the standard ASCII range
that is a precomposed character consisting of an alpha with an integral
acute accent. This allows easy access to such characters from a standard
keyboard and also allows the font designer to correctly place the accent in
relation to the underlying glyph. [n35] If this materializes in a useful
form and tools [n36] become available for the creation of good quality Greek
OpenType fonts by Greek scholars for free or inexpensive use by the
scholarly community (rather than professional type designers and commercial
developers at commercial prices), this could be a major boon for those of us
who work with Greek text, particularly in a web environment. [n37]
Existing fonts have a variety of problems. The current Mounce font is
serviceable, but is not well polished at this point (something that Bill
Mounce is working hard to rectify) and is also a serif design best suited
for printed output (though it can be used in other contexts). A similar
verdict is due SPIonic, plus it varies more radically from what has become
a fairly standard keyboard layout for basic characters other than alphabetic
ones. The character shapes are also rather awkward and uneven. SIL Galatia
is quite nice (if a bit "rotund") and has many precomposed characters, but
it has major differences in even the alphabetic layout (e.g., x and c are
reversed; eta is on the j key, etc.). The most polished fonts for koine
Greek are the expensive commercial fonts produced by Linguists Software
(Graeca, et al), but there are major problems with these fonts when moving
from one version to another of major software programs (most notably
Microsoft Word), rendering a long term investment in time and data
questionable. [n38] Not only are these fonts too expensive to require of
students, but licensing has also become unduly restrictive, making them
unusable for Internet course development using Adobe Acrobat (the license
now forbids even subset embedding in a pdf document!). For these and other
reasons I have ceased using Linguist Software fonts.
At this point I have settled on using Mounce as the standard student font
since it comes with their textbook and is serviceable. I have been gradually
moving all my course materials for classroom use to my own Galilee font
since these materials are for video projection display purposes in the
classroom or for reading on screen by Internet students. I have deliberately
designed Galilee as a sans serif, thick-stem-width font to make it more
legible in those settings. I am watching developments in Unicode and
OpenType and will incorporate them when it is practical to do so.
============================================
NOTES
[n33] This is possible by using two bytes per character rather than the
traditional one byte. This allows 2562 possible characters: 65,536. For more
information on the technical issues surrounding Unicode Greek fonts, see
"Unicode Polytonic Greek for the Web," by Patrick Rourke at
<http://www.ziplink.net/~ptrourke/fonts.htm>.
[n34] The OpenType font format is an extension of the TrueType font format
with added support for PostScript font data. These fonts are also referred
to as TrueType Open v.2.0 fonts. For more information, see Adobe's and
Microsoft's typography pages at:
<http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/opentype/> and
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.asp>. (OpenType was developed
jointly by Adobe and Microsoft). More technical OpenType information:
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/creators.htm>.
[n35] Other possible features include such things as automatic final
sigmas whenever a sigma is followed by a space or punctuation mark-though
this can be counterproductive for designing first year teaching materials
where this is not a desirable behavior in some instances.
[n36] Tools for working with OpenType are not yet easily available; the
next major release of FontLab (v. 4) which is due "imminently" will provide
the first such "friendly" tool for this technology of which I am aware. I
have been working with FontLab v. 3 during the past year and have found it
to be relatively easy to learn and use. FontLab appears to be the premier
font creation tool in the "under $1,000.00 range," surpassing the former
dominance of Fontographer (which has not been updated in many years). There
are, of course, much more sophisticated tools used by commercial type
houses, but these programs, if commercially available, cost thousands of
dollars.
[n37] I have developed a basic Greek font ("Galilee") that will be moved
to the OpenType format as soon as that is feasible. It will be freely
available for use by the scholarly community. Information on the current
beta version in TrueType format may be found at
<http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/galilee.htm>. The beta version is available
for download from the same page. One of the goals for this project is to
design a font optimized for use on screen and on the web rather than
primarily for printed output.
[n38] I have had to rework countless documents when upgrading to newer
versions of Word since previously entered Greek text becomes a series of
square boxes that cannot be salvaged. The workarounds that have been
suggested by the developers have been clumsy and time consuming at best and
sometimes results in loss of the formatting of the document-which takes
nearly as long to redo as simply reentering the Greek text in a different
font.
============================================
Rodney J. Decker, Th.D.
Associate Prof./NT
Baptist Bible Seminary
Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/default3.htm
============================================
---
You are currently subscribed to biblical-languages as: Peter_Kirk at sil.org
To unsubscribe send a blank email to
$subst('Email.Unsub')
To subscribe send email to join-biblical-languages at franklin.oit.unc.edu
Visit the archives at:
http://franklin.oit.unc.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=biblical-languages
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/biblical-languages/attachments/20011108/363ecace/attachment.htm
More information about the Biblical-languages
mailing list