Freaky Greeks

Ray Larabie

Check out the Greek Compacta and Eurostile in the 1988 Letraset catalog—quite progressive, I think. I like in Eurostile how the ζ is a z and the λ is dropped. And then in Compacta, they keep the β, ζ and ξ aligned to the x-height. Whaddya think?

Adam Jagosz

Dropped λ is common in modern (especially pointed-nib) calligraphy. It works there, because the entire "wide portion" of the letter is delegated to the descender space, kind of like Latin j. Not sure how well it works here.

Interesting how the arms are shorter than the x-height in Compacta's ψ — I suppose it aids legibility in the otherwise tightly packed forest of full stems.

Christian Thalmann

Ray Larabie said:

quite progressive, I think.

A lot of those strike me as heavily Latinized and just plain silly. I'm an advocate of progressive Greek, but not if it's badly done.

Craig Eliason

Hadn’t occurred to me before, but a bold condensed Ξ is pretty much impossible, isn’t it. 

Deactivated User

Rüdiger's Theodor and probably some others I've seen add a vertical bar to fill the gaps. Not sure how common a practice that is but it seems like it works.

John Savard

Well, a dropped lambda works very well in Letraset. If you don't like it, you can just move the sheet up.