Some newbie questions about Greek

Vasil Stanev

Hello,
I fancy to design some Greek supplement for one of my fonts. is it true that Greek stem width has to be slightly thinner than Latin, and if so, by what logic?

Also, I checked the very calming Gerry Leonidas lecture at Graham '17 and would like to know if there is somewhere a list of possible letter combinations for smallcaps. As far as I understand capitalized Greek vowels are only stressed at the beginning of words, so no need for kerning them to preceding letters (writing here about both caps and smallcaps)
Also, is the lc italic basically a slanted version with minor modifications?
I am also searching for as list of Greek ligatures to provide wider options for the buyers of the font.

The question about stem width is most important for me.

Thanks in advance!

John Savard

Although I am not qualified to answer this question, given the example of Times 827 for use in France, modified because certain typefaces were very popular in that country, suggests to me that if the stems should be thinner for Greek, it would be because the Greek people are habituated to certain typefaces which have thinner stems.

There is more information on this here.

John Hudson

With regard to accented caps and smallcaps:

The modern convention of writing accents for caps is to write them to the left of the letter, rather than above it. This is why the accents on caps only appear at the beginning of words, and are suppressed in all-caps. This is a relatively recent convention: I've not seem examples prior to the 19th Century. In Byzantine Greek uncials, the accents are placed above the letters, and in earlier Greek type they sometimes appear above and sometimes to the right (!) of the caps, even in all-caps settings.

Smallcaps are an interesting case. Historical examples exist of smallcaps being used to transcribe Byzantine uncial, with accents above. So my approach in fonts is to provide smallcap diacritic glyphs with accents above the letters, but to contextually suppress these by default. If users wants to display the accents, they can turn off the <calt> feature.

John Hudson

With regard to Greek stem weight:

This relates to the modulation pattern of the script, which traditionally reflected a broad nib pen rotated at a steeper angle than typical for Latin (and often less consistent than in Latin formal writing). This produces thinner vertical strokes and heavier horizontal strokes.

Thomas Phinney

Agree with John’s comment about the Greek stem weight—but note also that (as far as I understand it) this is only true for the lowercase; caps generally still get the same stress as Latin.

Emilios Theofanous

Hello Vasil.

In general, there is an acceptance of variation for the contrast axis for the Greek, so depending on this, the stems could follow either direction regarding their width. It all depends on your design choice on how similar in colour and body texture you want the scripts to be.

In sans serif (or one could say mono-linear or low-contrast for the Greek since no serifs exist to begin with) and in faces that follow the same (upright or traditional) contrast axis as the latin, the stems could be the same, but the Greek could have narrower proportions due to the constant repetition of round forms that make the script optically look wider.

When the axis is more close to the traditional Greek model, let that be horizontal or ‘reversed’ compared to the Latin, the stem width becomes thinner or somewhat ‘triangular’ due to weight placement. Proportions for the Greek are also here usually narrower.

Regarding the small caps, I don’t understand your question: ‘for a list of possible letter combinations for smallcaps’.

Letters with /tonos only appear at the beginning of words set in capitals, so yes, no need for kerning accented Greek capitals; you should however kern /space with them.

The design for the italics is an interesting field by itself, because as you know, Greek is hereditarily a cursive script. As a personal preference, I try to find solutions that offer the same amount of distinction with the roman for the Greek italic, as is in the design of the Latin. That is, a slanted version with some modifications could benefit a sans serif design, but miss out some character for serif typefaces. A solution to offer some distinction could be to use the alternative forms of some letters for the italic; e.g. letters like /alpha /beta /theta /kappa /phi have two versions of writing.

For the ligatures, there aren’t any (anymore) widely used, maybe /lambda_lambda and /gamma_gamma to compensate some spacing issues depending on the design.

I hope I answered some of your questions, if you have more happy to help!

Vasil Stanev

Emilos,
thank you! This answers my questions.