Help! Bold symbols!

[Pam Birtles]

Help help everybody!

I've got a huge pub to do which requires bold greek symbols (alpha, etc.).

Does anyone know of a symbol font which has a bold face?

Any assistance will be most gratefully appreciated.

Pam Birtles

[Abe Hendin]

Pam Birtles wrote:
> I've got a huge pub to do which requires bold greek symbols (alpha, etc.).
>
> Does anyone know of a symbol font which has a bold face?

Hi, Pam. You could look at http://www.linguistssoftware.com/mg.htm
(Linguist's Software modern Greek font which includes roman, italic,
bold, and bold-ital), but you should confirm whether it is compatible
with non-Unicode Ventura. You could also search the web for free Greek
fonts and see if any of them include bold.

Abe

[Abe Hendin]

Followup: you should also look at
http://www.linguistssoftware.com/lgk.htm . Same price, but I don't know
what type of characters you actually need, and since I've only studied
classical and biblical Greek I don't know what differences may lie in
modern Greek (the font I linked in my last post), you may find that an
ancient Greek font is more suitable--it may be more suited to Ventura's
lack of Unicode support.

Abe

[DJ]

Pam:

Math PI 4 has bold for upper and lower Greek, but not bold italic. There is a
Type 1 version from Adobe.

Darrell

[Daniel Lauber]

Did you check the fonts that come with WordPerfect on the Ventura 8 CDs? I
know they have a Greek Helvetica, Courier, and Century, but don't know if they
are available in bold face.

Pam Birtles wrote:

--

FROM:

Daniel Lauber
Planning/Communications
7215 Oak Avenue River Forest, IL 60305
Voice: 708/366-5200
Fax: 708/366-5280
email: d...@jobfindersonline.com
daniel...@abanet.org

[Klaas Wolterstorff]

I responded to this message the other day, but mistakenly did not respond to
the list. In retrospect, I think some others may be interested, so I'll
repeat and expand on myself here.

If what you're after is Greek characters, there is on the Ventura disk a
family of fonts -- Nimbus Roman (NimbusRomDGR) -- that contain the whole
Greek character set in the four standard styles (though perhaps two of the
styles are actually oblique rather than a true italic). One doesn't realize
that the Greek characters are there because the line samples in the manuals
and the sample page displayed by ATM show only Latin characters. But the
Greek character set is all there, in slots 0184 to 0254.

I myself never would have known about the Greek characters except that the
CorelDraw manual calls the font Nimbus Roman Greek, though the font appears
to be identical to the font on the Ventura disk, down to the internal font
name of NimbusRomDGR.

All in all I find the Nimbus Greek characters more pleasing than the Symbol
ones -- in the regular roman style they match the weight and x-height of the
text fonts I tend to use better than the Symbol version does. Others have
mentioned the fonts from Linguist's Software, but I've never found them
terribly attractive, especially their oblique versions. I'm also aware of a
version of Times New Roman Greek generated originally by Monotype (now
available through Adobe?), but I don't find that terribly elegant either. A
problem common to all of these fonts is that they don't have true italics
(or if they do, they're not very attractive). I recently became aware of a
new Minion Greek from Adobe -- Robert Bringhurst in his book _The Elements
of Typographic Style_ mentions that he's been working with a prerelease
version of Minion Greek, but I haven't seen it released as an independent
font yet. Minion Greek _is_ however available as part of the OpenType font
Minion Pro. This font has it all: true italics, alternate characters, a full
complement of accented characters as well as free floating accents -- and
that's just the Greek!. (Have a look as well at the other OpenType fonts
that are now available -- some bundled with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.)

I haven't bothered to buy Minion Pro because I don't think there's any way
to access any of the good stuff in Ventura. But with the suitable
application of a good font editor one could conceivably rework the character
set to generate a standard PS font that gives you what you need (and
possibly violate your font license agreement in the process). Question is,
are there commercially available font editors that understand OpenType? I've
used Fontographer in the past to rework standard PS fonts for setting
biblical Greek, and Fontographer understands unicode fonts, but I'm guessing
that OpenType is something beyond its capabilities (and will remain so,
since Macromedia appear to have no interest in the product). Does anyone
know about FontLab? It supports unicode and even multiple master fonts, but
its web site doesn't say anything about OpenType.

I've done a lot of poking around for Greek fonts and have assumed that by
now there ought to be any number of good ones available -- after all, there
must be publishers in Greece generating PostScript output -- but I have
always been struck by how slim the selection is. Many of those that are
available are of obvious poor quality (bad character spacing and kerning);
most of them don't have true italics; and a lot of them are just plain ugly.
Now with Minion Pro there's a Greek font that matches my most-used text
font, but I can't use it. Just another argument for full unicode -- and now
OpenType -- support in the next version of Ventura.

Best,

Klaas Wolterstorff

"Pam Birtles" <p...@pambirtles.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3baf59ed_3@cnews...

[Abe Hendin]

Klaas Wolterstorff wrote:
> If what you're after is Greek characters, there is on the Ventura disk a
> family of fonts -- Nimbus Roman (NimbusRomDGR) -- that contain the whole
> Greek character set in the four standard styles

Excellent to know, thanks Klaas.

Abe

[Frank Ziesing]

Hi Klaas,

I use FontLab 3.1 -- it can do almost everything with fonts, but it
doesn't support OpenType. And without OpenType the best part of unicode
is lost.

Now, FontLab 4 is going to be released any day. It is announced as fully
supporting OpenType, with customizable interface and powerful script
language --
see

http://www.textmatters.com/atypi/news2001/7.html

FontLab used to be 400 $, I think an academic version was also
available. I got it as an upgrade from TypeDesigner for about 250 DM
(FontLab somehow swallowed TypeDesigner).

Greetings,
Frank

[Klaas Wolterstorff]

Whoo Hoo! Thanks for the info.

I gave FontLab a try back at version 2.5 -- my manual has the copyright date
of 1994 in it -- but determined that for my very limited uses it didn't
offer any significant advantages over Fontographer. Now the lay of the land
appears to have changed significantly. FontLab the company have obviously
kept up with developing their font editing products whereas Macromedia have
not. In fact, for a variety of reasons I no longer remember, I still use the
AltSys version of Fontographer (also dating back to 1994), finding it more
useful than the later Macromedia revisions.

Of course the best long-term scenario is that Ventura supports OpenType
natively, but in the meantime it looks as though I'll at least be able to
generate a Minion Greek that's usable with the current VP8.

Regards,
Klaas

"Frank Ziesing" <Frank....@web.de> wrote in message
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