I’ve been trying to work with the latest version of Jim Tauber’s MorphGNT text file. For those who don’t know it, it contains all the words in the Greek New Testament, one per line, each identified as noun/verb/plural/whatever, with the word itself as found in the text, plus the dictionary form of the word. No English meaning; but that can be got from using the dictionary form to look up the meaning in the XML file of Strong’s dictionary.
The Greek used to be present in beta-code, but Jim has now converted to unicode. That’s fine; except that you now need a font in which to work on it. Like most text files, you want a fixed-width font.
I suspect Jim does his magic on linux, where one is available. But on Windows there is no such free font. I understand, tho, that the new version of “Courier New” shipped in Vista will do the trick.
I came across this discussion in a typographic forum, where a Microsoft font-person lurks. It lists some of the possible commercial fonts you could use.
I wouldn’t be so quick to say one doesn’t exist:
DejaVu Sans Mono: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/
Everson Mono: http://www.evertype.com/emono/
FreeMono: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
GNU Unifont: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
are all fixed-width and support Unicode polytonic Greek (although some aren’t the most attractive fonts).
Good resources for this sort of thing:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/
Thank you very much indeed for this. I had no idea, despite a Google search! I will try these out.
(Your comment was treated as spam by akismet, and I only today saw it).
Could you please post at the typophile.com discussion that you managed to find several open-source fonts?
Glad to! I haven’t tried any of them out tho – you know, the rush to Christmas!
DejaVu Sans Mono, FreeMono and Unifont did not work with SuperEdi, the text editor I was using. Everson Mono worked, but looked awful.