The tonos is used in the Greek script to denote stressed vowels. It is placed above some lower case letters and to the top left of the same upper case letters.
Is the placement to the top left of upper case letters to avoid collisions with the descenders of the letters on the line above or is it a cultural thing ?
The significance of this is that I am doing small capitals for a Greek script. There is room above the small capitals for a tonos. If the reason for the placement is to avoid collisions then this would be appropriate but if it is expected by Greek speaking people that the tonos would be placed to the left of a capital letter coming up to the Cap Height then it would be inappropriate to place them over the small capitals.
I have looked at several fonts but there seems to be no consensus on this.
Please advise me, especially if you are Greek.
Comments
Historically, one of the uses of the Greek smallcaps has been to represent uncial text, which follows Byzantine conventions in having the accents above the letters. Laurentius' edition of Apollonius of Rhodes; Argonautica is a famous example.
In my Greek fonts with smallcaps, I follow this convention, with the marks above, as the default display, but have a stylistic set that applies the same mark suppression as the all-caps. [Note that this mark suppression is more complicated than just removing all the marks. Apart from the kind of situation @K Pease notes, there are some words where removal of the tonos — or other accent/breathing mark in polytonic — requires contextual insertion of a dialytika (diaeresis) on the adjacent vowel.]
[Heh. I linked to that Flickr image without even realising that it was me who posted it, eleven years ago. I'd forgotten that I even had a Flicker account.]
For an alternative interpretation take a look at the type designs of Panos Vassiliou.
Centro, for instance, while not Victorian, is a slab serif style with eta resembling /n, nu /v and chi /x.
It is indeed a “hybrid approach”, working both ways, in that while the nu looks very n-ish without a descender, its curled tail nonetheless follows the traditional form of iota, and this feature has been “copypasted” in the face’s Latin /i. Brilliant harmonizing.
I must admit that when I first came across typefaces in which the /n had a rather “cursive” right serif—notably ITC Century—it didn’t look right. But then I discovered other faces with this feature, such as Palatino, Koch Antiqua and Artcraft, and I became more comfortable with it, eventually employing it in Oneleigh.
That style of /n does seem more at home in an old style, which is closer to the broad pen, calligraphic origins of Latin type and less rigid, but it doesn’t seem to have harmed ITC Century or Centro.