Posted by:
James18343 John,
Congratulations on this prerelease! A real milestone. The font looks good.
How and when do you want to receive reports/queries regarding crashes etc.?
James Ernest
Baker Academic
-----Original Message-----
From: John Hudson [mailto:tiro@tiro.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 1:24 PM
To: SBL Fonts
Subject: SBL Greek 0.90 BETA now available
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New Message on SBL Fonts
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From: John Hudson
Message 1 in Discussion
I'm very pleased to report that the SBL Greek font is finally ready for public testing. It can be downloaded from the documents section of the SBL Fonts user community:
http://groups.msn.com/SBLFonts/documents.msnwNote that this is version 0.90 BETA, a *pre-release* version of the font. The release version will be 1.00 and will be made available from the SBL website, along with documentation and some polytonic Greek keyboard drivers.
Although the SBL Greek font does not involve the same level of complexity of mark positioning layout intelligence as the SBL Hebrew, it is a much larger font, with plenty of its own comlicated elements. Some things to watch for while testing the font:
Kerning (adjustment of inter-character spacing):
In many respects, this is the most complicated aspect of polytonic Greek layout, because of the quantity of diacritic characters that need to be carefully spaced so as not to collide with adjacent letters.
There are actually two different kinds of kerning implemented in the SBL Greek. The primary kerning is OpenType GPOS kerning, which includes kerning data for both encoded and unencoded glyphs (examples of unencoded glyphs are variant forms, smallcaps, superior letters, ligatures, nomina sacra forms, etc., which are not assigned Unicode values but are accessible via OpenType Layout features); even after filtering the kern pairs resulting from class-based kerning to remove most obviously non-occuring pairs, the GPOS kerning still includes adjustments to almost 50,000 combinations. In addition, the GPOS kerning feature contains some experimental contextual lookups that automatically increase the letterspacing in all-caps and smallcaps settings. [These lookups may or may not be present in the release version of the font, depending how well they perform in testing. Initial tests in some applications indicate a conflict with mark positioning (see below), but this appears to be an application bug, not a font problem, since it works correctly elsewhere.] The GPOS kerning will be automatically active in applications that support it; these include professional page layout applications such as Adobe InDesign.
The secondary kerning is a subset of approx. 6,000 pairs in a legacy format kern table. These kern pairs support only encoded characters, and will be appropriate for setting typical polytonic text without glyph variants. There are several practical reasons for the reduced number of kern pairs in this table, involving both font and application limitations. The kern table kerning should be active in applications that do not support the GPOS kerning; this includes MS Word (Windows), but note that kerning is off by default in Word and needs to be turned on via the Format/Font menu.
Nomina Sacra forms:
The SBL Greek font supports arbitrary nomina sacra forms for transcription of NT manuscripts and other documents in which these occur. The convention for encoding nomina sacra is to insert a combining overline character (Unicode 0305) after each letter in the nominum sacrum, e.g. ?¯?¯?¯µ¯
The nomina sacra feature is implemented using OpenType GSUB lookups which control the length of the overline relative to the letters below it, and also contextually control the height of the line, so that it sits higher in words that contain tall letters. Unfortunately, this contextual aspect of the nomina sacra support only works in applications that support the OpenType Layout 'Contextual Alternates' feature (incl. MS Word 2003 and 2007). [Mellel users should note that this feature is supported in that program, but needs to be turned on].
Non-standard diacritics and papyrus transcription:
Most of the diacritics in SBL Greek are handled as distinct glyphs in the font, i.e. precomposed combinations of base letters and marks, and most of these are also separately encoded following the Unicode polytonic Greek encoding. But the font also supports GPOS mark positioning for additional diacritic support. This enables users to display non-standard polytonic diacritics that may occur in some manuscript sources, e.g. ??. [Note, however, that when diacritics marks are positioned to the left of uppercase letters, as in this example, additional space is not automatically added; this may be implemented in a later version of the font, but for now users will need to insert an extra word space.] This mark positioning functionality works in MS Word 2003 and 2007, and probably in Mellel, but is not working correctly in Adobe InDesign CS2.
In addition to non-standard polytonic diacritics, GPOS is also used to support mark positioning for above and below dots (Unicode 0307 and 0323 respectively) and other marks found in transcription of papyri and other early documents, e.g.
0307 - COMBINING DOT ABOVE
0323 - COMBING DOT BELOW
1DC0 - COMBINING DOTTED GRAVE ACCENT
1DC1 - COMBINING DOTTED ACUTE ACCENT
0359 - COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW
NT editorial marks etc.:
The SBL Greek font supports New Testament inline editorial marks:
2E00 - RIGHT ANGLE SUBSTITUTION MARKER
2E01 - RIGHT ANGLE DOTTED SUBSTITUTION MARKER
2E02 - LEFT SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
2E03 - RIGHT SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
2E04 - LEFT DOTTED SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
2E05 - RIGHT DOTTED SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
2E06 - RAISED INTERPOLATION MARKER
2E07 - RAISED DOTTED INTERPOLATION MARKER
2E08 - DOTTED TRANSPOSITION MARKER
2E09 - LEFT TRANSPOSITION BRACKET
2E0A - RIGHT TRANSPOSITION BRACKET
2E0B - RAISED SQUARE
2E0C - RAISED SMALL DIAGONAL UPPER LEFT TO LOWER RIGHT
2E0D - RAISED SMALL DIAGONAL LOWER LEFT TO UPPER RIGHT
and also papyrological punctuation symbols etc.:
2E0E - EDITORIAL CORONIS*
2E0F - PARAGRAPHOS
2E10 - FORKED PARAGRAPHOS
2E11 - REVERSED FORKED PARAGRAPHOS
2E12 - HYPODIASTOLE
2E13 - DOTTED OBELOS
2E14 - DOWNWARDS ANCORA
2E15 - UPWARDS ANCORA
2E16 - DOTTED RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE
205A - TWO DOT PUNCTUATION
2056 - THREE DOT PUNCTUATION
2058 - FOUR DOT PUNCTUATION
2059 - FIVE DOT PUNCTUATION
205D - TRICOLON
205B - FOUR DOT MARK
205C - DOTTED CROSS
In applications such as InDesign that support the Stylistic Sets layout feature or otherwise provide access to glyph variants, three different forms of the editorial koronis are available.
All-caps and smallcaps diacritic handling:
In applications that support the Contextual Alternates layout feature, the SBL Greek font will automatically apply traditional rules for suppression of diacritic marks in all-caps settings. This includes the removal of all accents except dialytika (diaeresis) and also the contextual insertion of dialytika in non-diphthongs indicated by an accent on the first vowel, e.g. ??µ???a ->
?.
In applications that support smallcap variants, this logic is also applied to smallcaps settings.
If users do not want to use the allcaps or smallcaps diacritic suppression, they need to turn off the Contextual Alternates layout feature (not possible in NotePad or Wordpad on Windows, where this feature is on by default). This feature is not supported in MS Word.
There are other goodies in the font -- e.g. superior glyph variants for both upper- and lowercase Greek letters, and archaic characters such as digamma and koppa --, which will be documented in the manual. The font contains a subset of Latin alphabetic characters, punctuation and symbols supporting the Windows 1253 Greek 8-bit codepage. Due to a peculiarity of MS Word, you need to enter at least one Greek character in the font before you can enter any of these Latin characters: if you select the SBL Greek font and immediately start typing Latin characters, the font reverts to the default (e.g. Times New Roman).
Regards, John
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