Historically, Greek typefaces would not include both upright and slanted italic characters like Roman faces do, instead choosing generally either an entirely upright face or an entirely slanted one. Greek typefaces also being traditionally somewhat calligraphic, in every Greek family I have seen with a matching italic/slanted face, the change is much simpler than an italic is for Roman (since the basic calligraphic nature of the letters has not changed). So when designing a Greek font, do you prefer to slant the upright as a basis for an italic, or start again from scratch and, if so, with what principles for matching with an upright Greek/Latin and/or the Latin italics?
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[Image from Atelier Fluxus Virus.]
As the slanted/italic style is generally used for contrast with the upright/roman, it doesn’t seem optimal that they both be “scripty”, and it seemed to me that the traditional aplá/Lipsías relationship is back to front—with the upright/roman being even more scripty than the slanted/italic.
My parameters to create the italic are the number of strokes in a ductus, and fluidity. If there are variant forms for a glyph in Greek, these too are to be explored.
Whichever is more angular, has more strokes required to be written, or whichever form requires lifting of the pen, these become the uprights. Case in point, the angular sigma was revived due to classical Greek scholarship in Western Europe from the 1400's to the 1800's. If one from is more fluid, requires less strokes or requires almost no lifting of the pen, these become the italic forms.
However, the constraining factor for fluidity is that the strokes must not have overarching and extremely flourishing elements like swashes or else, these will affect the overall grey colour. The Greeks want Greek typefaces to have the same notan and overall grey colour as Latin typefaces, that is, under Tatiana Marza's paper.
Based on my understanding, the lunate epsilon is a mere typographical variant for Greek two-tiered epsilon, but these glyphs in the scientific world are different mathematical variables. The pomega is archaic, but it can be revived the way the angular sigma is revived. Since Greek is rich in glyph variants, they are all to be explored and tested. But the ultimate opinion on readability still lies with the native Greek readers, the scholars and scientists who also use them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170818015143/http://www.typophile.com/node/101331
I also have an article from Gerry Leonidas in Medium which shows the two-stroke alpha in Candara:
https://medium.com/@gerryleonidas/designing-greek-typefaces-eac0de7767cc
Both this ductus and what I think of as the 'fish ductus' with the crossed strokes on the right are found in early types and the manuscripts on which they were based.
To spot the influence of this ductus in a typeface, look at the way the bottom of the bowl flows towards the top of the stem on the right, e.g.:
Also, your written example is not really “one stroke”, as the beginning of both your alphas is extremely unlikely in calligraphy, involving pushing the nib north-westerly against the paper (for right-handed scribes). Although with a ball-point nib, it is possible to do that. So, with a split-nib pen, to write your left alpha would require a ductus of three strokes, not one.
I believe that both types of alpha—this and the “fish”—would, in cursive Greek with a split-nib pen, start at the top right and proceed in a clockwise direction, easing up in pressure while lightly dragging up past 9 o’clock while simultaneously rotating the nib angle to prepare for going heavy across the top. The really different method is therefore the bottom of the three types you showed, which is too heavy on the left to accommodate any kind of up-stroke there, and is distinguished, by this stress, as the Latin construction, with its steady rhythm of strong downward stems.
Further to me previous post, which was based on my own calligraphy (mostly broad-nibbed), I consulted The Calligrapher’s Bible, by David Harris, and discovered that the number of strokes depends on both the nib/brush and the style.
But in polytonic Greek, alternate /α is a daunting prospect!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2417759_From_Unicode_to_Typography_a_Case_Study_the_Greek_Script
According to him, the tailed rho is more commonly viewed in the italic versions, but his work is viewed in the context of scholarly Greek typeface design.