Another Word in Favour of New Athena Unicode Font

Over on Abnormal Interests, Duane sings the praises of the New Athena Unicode Font.  Another word in its favour for scholars of antiquity -- it has a fine Coptic font and so is ideal if you work on Nag Hammadi codices and so on.  I have found it a lifesaver for constructing synopses of the Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptics, where one needs Coptic alongside Greek, and it is the best way I have found for getting things lined up properly without line-alignment going nuts and driving you mad, which happens when you combine different fonts in Synopsis.

Update (22:14): In comments, Jon recommends Antinoou: A Standard Font for Coptic. I have downloaded and given it a whirl and it's definitely a nice looking Coptic font and in many respects superior to New Athena Unicode. Its Greek is a little less pleasing to the eye, but it does render my Greek / Coptic Synopses of Thomas and the Synoptic successfully, so it is going to be a competitor to New Athena -- no question.

Type Greek and the Sublinear Dot

If you want a speedy and efficient way to type unicode Greek, Type Greek.com is a fantastic web based option. I recommended Type Greek on the blog back in April 2007 and I have had a link to it on the Greek NT Gateway fonts page since then. I was struggling recently with sublinear dots (the little dots you put under letters when doing textual criticism to show that it is uncertain) and wondered whether Type Greek might have that option. It didn't so I asked Randy Hoyt whether it might be possible for this feature to be added. Ask and you shall receive! Now if you hit the @ key, your sublinear dot is added, just like that.

Time to move on from SPIonic

A recent correspondent commented on a repeated problem with the use of the SPIonic font, the free Scholars Press font designed by James Adair that has served Biblical scholars and students well for over ten years. The problem is that many users have confused the vau/digamma with the final sigma. Published books and articles are regularly produced with the wrong letter. It's something I have battled with for a long time, often having to point this out to graduate students, or correcting it in manuscripts I am reviewing or editing. There are other serious issues with the font too, not least among which is the necessity to use different keystrokes for accenting different width of vowels, something few users realize, and which results in some horrible looking manuscripts. For a long time, the solution was simply education, to make scholars, students and publishers aware of the difficulties. But the time has now surely come to say a warm and nostalgic thanks and to bid it adieu. For those who have not yet embraced unicode, now is the time to do it. For those who have, let's continue to try to persuade those who haven't.