17 replies to this topic

[Alistair]

Is there a way to change to Greek font? I like the free fonts from the Greek Font Society (http://www.greekfont...typefaces1.html) and would like to use them.

So far I haven't found a way to change it, please excuse if I have missed the obvious.

Thanks.

[J. T.]

The fonts in Accordance are proprietary fonts specific to the program. As of now, it's not possible to change the font.

[Joe Weaks]

Accordance uses its own Greek font Helena within the Accordance application. You can not use a different Greek font inside of Accordance.
However, you have lots of flexibility with which Greek font you use when you are copying text and pasting it into your documents. Have a look at Accordance preferences/Greek & Hebrew to see the options.

[Alistair]

The fonts in Accordance are proprietary fonts specific to the program. As of now, it's not possible to change the font.

OK, thanks. But please consider this a request to be able to change them.

Accordance uses its own Greek font Helena within the Accordance application. You can not use a different Greek font inside of Accordance.
However, you have lots of flexibility with which Greek font you use when you are copying text and pasting it into your documents. Have a look at Accordance preferences/Greek & Hebrew to see the options.

Thanks Joe, but I only want to change the font within Accordance.

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Alistair,
changing Greek or Hebrew (or Syriac) font within Accordance would be an enormous task as I understand it, as every original language text would have to be recoded to the new system. The mere thought of that is pretty scary, and I wouldn't be the one doing it!

I'm not saying it will never happen, that's not the part I play, but is sure daunts me just to think about it.

May I ask what you see the advantages to choosing your own Gk/Heb font to be?

[Enoch]

I also would like to be able to select the font. The idea would be to increase legibility.
Way back with the DOS 1.6 version of Logos (or was it Windows 3.11?) you could change Greek fonts.
Now that's what we need; a DOS version of Accordance!

I don't understand the difficulty. So far as I know, there is actually only one alphabet invented my man, with a lot of different fonts & some variations; Greek being one font group of that one alphabet. Now if we can have different so-called English (or Latin) fonts on Accordance, why not different Greek fonts? If MS-Word can have different Greek & Hebrew fonts, why not Accordance? Davka Writer has a bizillion Hebrew fonts.

Edited by Enoch, 23 November 2012 - 10:17 PM.

[Julie Falling]

Enoch - I do know that the three Greek fonts I have on my laptop have different keyboards. Helena uses one, unicode another, and the Teknia font a third. Since the keyboards do not seem to be standardized, I would expect that to be an issue, too.

I find both Helena and Teknia to be easy to read (except for the miserable breathing marks - my old eyes have problems with those); unicode is harder for me to make out, and, IMO, kinda ugly.

Edited by Julie Falling, 24 November 2012 - 08:29 AM.

[Alistair]

Hi Alistair, changing Greek or Hebrew (or Syriac) font within Accordance would be an enormous task as I understand it, as every original language text would have to be recoded to the new system. The mere thought of that is pretty scary, and I wouldn't be the one doing it! I'm not saying it will never happen, that's not the part I play, but is sure daunts me just to think about it. May I ask what you see the advantages to choosing your own Gk/Heb font to be?

As an aid to reading, really. Its partly aesthetic, partly just simple preference, and partly historical (e.g choosing a font that mirrors the print editions of the Complutensian Polyglot or the UBS 4.)

It seems to me that instead of recoding the way Accordance works a quicker way would be to duplicate the Helena font and edit all they glyphs. it would still be a lot of work and its more or a workaround than a solution. The user would have to load either the original Helena font OR the new edited version in the Finder/Font Book, so it wouldn't be the most user-friendly to implement, but to my mind it sounds like it could work.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

I find both Helena and Teknia to be easy to read (except for the miserable breathing marks - my old eyes have problems with those); unicode is harder for me to make out, and, IMO, kinda ugly.

Julie: unicode is not one font, but a "coding" systems used by most modern fonts (as opposed to "legacy" fonts like Helena and Teknia). If the unicode fonts you have don't look nice, you might look for some other fonts that look nicer. Cardo, SBL Greek, and SBL Hebrew are some of the better looking unicode fonts in my opinion.

[Julie Falling]

Julie: unicode is not one font, but a "coding" systems used by most modern fonts (as opposed to "legacy" fonts like Helena and Teknia). If the unicode fonts you have don't look nice, you might look for some other fonts that look nicer. Cardo, SBL Greek, and SBL Hebrew are some of the better looking unicode fonts in my opinion.

Thanks, Lorinda. The Greek font that came on my Mac, whatever it is, really is ugly and difficult to read! I'll check out the others.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

More than one of the included fonts will handle Greek, including Times, Times New Roman, Lucida Grande, and Arial Unicode. Gentium is another free font I found for Greek.

If you copy a verse from the Greek New Testament, set the "Preview" menu in FontBook to Custom and paste in the Greek verse, you can run through your fonts and see which ones will support unicode Greek, and decide which one or ones you like best.

[Ryan G]

I'd be pretty shocked if the Accordance development team / programmers actually hard coded a particular font into the module itself. I'll bet that it is a fairly easy thing to change, for the programming team. I'd like to add my two cents and say that I'd like to see this become a selectable option as well.

Secondly, I'd like to say Cardo is a pretty nice font, and I am in agreement with Lorinda there.

[Kevin Soars]

If I may add, I rather like the New Peniniim MT font. However, I do have to add that I am am out of my depth here and do not know if this is unicode or not!

Kevin.

[Joe Weaks]

To release a text, as a document or as an Accordance module, you do hard-code the font. More specifically, you hard-code the font-encoding—the collection of bits and bytes that represent each character or glyph. You can't just change the display font from Helena to Gentium in a text that's encoded using the Helena font encoding.
Accordance and its documents existed before there was a Unicode font encoding. It would've been great if Accordance had transitioned to using Unicode encodings long ago in its text and module creation. I have no idea if that transition is in progress, but doesn't the presence of the Unicode Bibles suggest that?
For those who don't understand it, I'd suggest researching the most basic concepts of different language font encoding. One place to start could be my article on
Bible Scholars' Introduction to Unicode Fonts

[Ken Simpson]

Thanks Joe, helpful article. And while I am no programmer, the little I know about it suggests to me that it would actually be a very big job. And all for a choice of font?

I agree it would be sorta nice to use your favourite font, but Helena and Yehudit are pretty good (at least to my eyes...yes, just my opinion).

[Enoch]

Actually I am seeing 2 different Greek fonts on Accordance, if you consider italics a different font. When I open BDAB and put the cursor on a verse reference and look at Instant Details, I see both an upright & an italic font, as for example with the entry on graphe in BDAG where the reference is Mark 12:10.

But I just discovered something: One cannot do a copy of Instant Details off of BDAG. When one activates "copy as," the menu has the Instant Details copy function greyed out.
I was going to paste the example here, but find I cannot. And my display of the Greek text USB-4 does not show italics, but rather, bold for NT quotations/allusions to the OT. I guess you could call bold another font.

[Alistair]

You are technically correct in describing bold and italic as separate fonts. Together all these fonts make up one typeface, in this case Helena.

[Enoch]

Julie: You comment on difficulty with viewing breathings on initial vowels of Greek words. I have long thought that the smooth breathing mark should be abolished from all Greek texts. It has no basis in ancient texts, so far as I know. And its only function is to confuse you with the rough breathing mark. Then when no breathing mark be used, that means it is "smooth."

So how would that be for a new feature on Accordance. In the preferences you specify that you want all smooth breathings eliminated!

Edited by Enoch, 05 December 2012 - 10:20 PM.