I am grateful for the responses I received at the SBL Greek forum (
http://forum.fontlab.com/sbl-greek/sbl-greek-now-available-for-download-t319.0.html); as was suggested to me there, I'm bringing my questions about what to expect from SBL BibLit here.
From the response there I do understand that when SBL BibLit is spoken of as a "transliteration font" that simply means that none of the Roman characters with diacritics that are commonly used to transliterate Biblical languages will fail to be included at its assigned place in the Unicode scheme.
I still don't clearly understand:
A. Will SBL BibLit have the wonderful SBL Greek characters included in the appropriate Greek & Polytonic Greek character ranges?
B. If so, what is the point of having SBL Greek as a separate font, since its characters would be a subset of BibLit's?
C. If not, why not? Why have to use & switch between two fonts in the same series in a single publication, when one all-inclusive font could make any & all specialized fonts unnecessary?
In other words, I'm looking for confirmation that SBL intends to produce a single font that, like other available fonts--Arno Pro, Gentium, Old Standard--can be used for Greek and Roman text.
If I should be granted the luxury of having even my idle questions answered, I'd ask:
D. Will the SBL font team contemplate making Greek italics, as are found in e.g. those other fonts I mentioned? (At least SBL Greek has not done what Junicode has done & made it so that any italicized Greek in a document renders as garbage.)
Again, with admiration for what these fonts are already certain to accomplish,
T.W.
