Greek Fonts (Unicode)

What Greek fonts should I use on my computer?

Regardless of whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac, the first answer to this question is that you should not be using a font that replaces Latin letters with the shapes of Greek letters (which typifies fonts created in the 1980s and 1990s). Rather, you should type all Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, etc. using Unicode.

The advantages of this approach include:

1. If you share your documents (with colleagues, students, a publisher, on the web, etc.) your correspondents will not need a specific font to view your text, as Unicode is a universal standard.
2. If you want to change the appearance of your document, say, from serif to sans-serif fonts, you can change the whole document in one go and the Greek will match the look-and-feel of the rest of the text (fonts permitting).
3. Greek characters are encoded in exactly the same places in all Unicode fonts, so changing font does not change the value of your Greek letters, as is the case with non-Unicode methods.
4. A growing number of text processors can handle Unicode Greek, while old-fashioned one-byte fonts are deprecated and unlikely to be supported by new tools.
5. In the computer-readable encoding behind your document, that alpha really is an alpha, not just an 'a' with a font-shift to either side.

Although it is now an obvious choice to use Unicode fonts supporting polytonic Greek and extended Latin, the most popular font is often still Times New Roman, a font which, while it does include modern Greek Unicode codepoints in its range, does not always support the many polytonic accents necessary for writing and displaying ancient Greek (it depends upon the font version). However, at least three of the other most common (and attractive) fonts from the Microsoft packages do support polytonic Greek: Palatino Linotype, Arial Unicode MS, and Lucida Grande. Another great alternative to the Times New Roman or Times families is Libertinus Serif (an evolution of the Linux Libertine family).

In addition to such general purpose fonts, the following free and open fonts fit most scholarly uses: Gentium Plus, Cardo, and Asea for serif fonts; Lato for a sans serif font; Cousine and Ubuntu Mono are great monospace fonts supporting extended Greek. The historical typefaces of the Greek Font Society, like GFS Didot and GFS Elpis, are remarkable.

All of these fonts can be installed on Mac, Linux, and Windows machines; they can also be used with LaTeX.

For more information, see these excellent sites on Greek Unicode fonts:

• TLG list of Unicode Greek fonts
• Nick Nicholas' font test page at the TLG
• Patrick Rourke's Unicode pages at the Stoa
• Dumbarton Oaks Guide to Unicode Greek
• Russell Cottrell, Unicode Greek fonts
• Gabriel Bodard's font help page from InsAph
• Unicode font advice from Tyndale Tech blog
• George Douros's Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts

Typing Unicode Greek can be as straightforward as typing Greek using an old-fashioned font; see our guidelines on Greek Keyboards (Unicode).