Greek ligatures in modern fonts

Adam Jagosz
Adam Jagosz Posts: 690
edited October 2018 in Type History
This reads "ΠΑΠΑΔΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ / PAPADOPOULOU". I suppose this is just a ligature of omicron and upsilon on the font level:
Despite the ligature's origin in Greek, there is no separate provision for its encoding in the Greek script, because it was deemed to be a mere ligature on the font level but not a separate underlying character. A proposal for encoding it as "Greek letter ou" was made in 1998, but was rejected. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ou_(ligature)
As much as I could deduce, the use case above is just a branding decision? Did you ever happen to provide this ligature in your fonts, or any other ligatures for Greek? If so, did you put it in liga, dlig, or elsewhere?
I would appreciate native speakers' opinions on how this Ο_Υ ligature affects the logotype's impression. I suppose the Greek are rather well acquainted with it? But this is a different situation than with Latin f-ligatures, which are (or at least supposed to be) transparent to the average reader.
Edit: I'm not sure if History of Typography is the right category choice for this topic, maybe Technique & Theory suits better. What I initially had in mind when I started writing was a bit different.
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Comments

  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,051
    edited October 2018
    I included /Omicron_Upsilon as a DLIG in Quinoa, in particular for titling purposes:

  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 690
    edited October 2018
    What is curious is that you implemented this character like the Latin OU digraph — with a closed top. Can you give a reference? I was only able to spot the open-top variant in Greek type and lettering... Well, particularly only in the brand I showed in the OP, and maybe, just maybe, in some hand-painted signs, but I don't remember.
  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 637
    edited October 2018
    I’d be curious to see what the uppercase Omega in the font used for the word ‘Παπαδοπούλου’ in the above image looks like.
  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 637
    edited October 2018
    I’d also be curious to know why Typedrawers doesn’t like lowercase pi :smile: Is my previous post mangled for everyone, or is it just Safari under macOS Mojave?


    Here’s what I'm seeing:



    And here’s what appears in edit mode:



  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 690
    edited October 2018
    I think I know what's going on. Our copy of Alright Sans has an empty glyph in the /pi slot which prevents Lucida Sans Unicode from kicking in. Neither “Alright”, nor “Okay” :smirk:
    Btw, the editor hosts an entirely separate <html> element — which has no access to the Alright's @font-face. The editor's content is then displayed in Lucida, even though its CSS is the same as for the posts.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,051
    edited October 2018
    André: The ligature best fits into the Quinoa Titling style, where the Omega is highly stylized. The one on the right is the default Omega of the text style.

  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 637
    Thanks, Christian. I was actually curious, though, about the one on the Chrispie's box where the Omicron_Upsilon ligature looks more like a rotated Omega than like the form you use in Quinoa with which I am more familiar.
  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 690
    When I first saw this open-top Omicron_Upsilon, it just clicked as totally logical to me, because not only do the diagonal strokes resemble the arms of the uppercase Upsilon, but also the overall glyph resembles Latin U (or Latin Upsilon). Whereas the rounded closed-top form looks quite lowercase-ish.
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 826
    I have discovered this years ago and I love to include it in my fonts.




  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 690

    I’m reuploading the photo of the packaging from the OP for posteriority.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,306
    The Van Winkle Printers’ Guide (New York, 1818) shows the ‘Abbreviations’ sigma-tau, omicron-upsilon, kai (the Greek ‘ampersand’), and omicron-sigma. Lower case only.

    I therefore put the first three in my mid-century American revival Modern Suite (Scotch Modern and Figgins Sans). The omicron-sigma was cool, but a bit too flashy, I thought.

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