Ancient Greek and Hebrew Fonts on Logos
I would like to have ancient Greek and Hebrew fonts on Logos.
It would give me practice so that I will be more able to read from the original manuscripts.
It will also make the Bibles seem more authentic than they do with modern fonts.
I will be more able to put myself back in time to when they were originally written.
They will also be more enjoyable to read.
I have noticed that Microsoft have added "Papyrus P75" ancient Greek font and "Evyoni Palaeo" ancient Hebrew font to Microsoft Office. Sadly, the Evyoni Palaeo font does not go from right to left. Also, they only work on an English keyboard and not Greek or Hebrew.
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If you have resources that contain Greek or Hebrew, Logos displays them just fine using default settings. The fonts will be in the style used in print works.
Of the fonts you listed, "Evyoni Palaeo" is a modern Hebrew font and "Papyrus P75" is based on the calligraphy of a single papyrus parchment. Both lack the glyphs and encoding to adequately display ancient texts.
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Keter Aram Tsova is included in font archive => http://culmus.sourceforge.net/ancient/index.html (Shofar also has diacritics and cantillation marks)
Society of Biblical Literature has SBL BibLit font => https://www.sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts.aspx that is usable in Logos and Verbum
Dreaming of a Paleo Hebrew unicode font for use in Logos/Verbum (the Paleo Hebrew font in culmus font archive does not appear in application)
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Hi Lee,I can't get these fonts to work with Logos. The fonts don't use the modern Greek or Hebrew keyboards. You have to use the English ones to get them to work in Word for Windows. I have tried to convert things that I have copied from Logos into Word. In Word the Logos Greek and Hebrew don't convert into these old fonts at all.Evyoni Palaeo is the way the Jewish alphabet was before the Jews left for Babylon. It is not modern Hebrew at all. It even types in the wrong direction for Hebrew. The Greek font does indeed come from the P75 New Testament manuscript dated about 200 - 300 AD as you said.I was hoping that Logos could come up with similar fonts that actually work on Logos.Best wishes,Bob Griffin.0
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Hi "Keep Smiling 4 Jesus",
None of these fonts are the font that the Jews used just before they went to Babylon. One of your fonts is a much older font. I need that font because I can read things in the British Museum that use that font. Eg for the Shebna Tomb Lintol dated about 700BC. Evyoni Palaeo is the same font as the one used just before the Jews went to Babylon. I can't get it to work when I copy things onto Word from Logos. It would be even better if I could read things in that font in Logos itself. It is also the the font that the Lord's name is written in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Best wishes,
Bob Griffin
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You're right about Evyoni Palaeo, I confused it with another font of the same name (it's a homemade font basically).
The thing is both fonts lack the pointing, diacritics and miscellaneous glyphs that are needed to fully represent the manuscripts. That is why print publications have settled on the square script for Hebrew and Porson-style Greek glyphs. The font and publishing industry has grown around this settled convention, so there are probably no specialist fonts that plug into the convention seamlessly, e.g. perfectly displaying pointed OT text as unpointed.
Try out these fonts if you don't have them already:
Greek: SBL Greek Doulos
Hebrew: SBL Hebrew EzraIf you need smooth left-to-right conversions you might need the Hebrew Language Pack on Windows and/or Hebrew Proofing / Language Pack on Office.
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Robert Griffin said:
Hi Lee, I can't get these fonts to work with Logos.
This is because they are not UNICODE fonts. If your Papyrus 75 font is the one I have seen on the web at https://www.bibleplaces.com/greek_fonts/, it uses the "bibleworks key-mapping" technique from somewhen in the last century. Basically it puts a kind of (ancient looking) Alpha character into the font table where the English (actually Latin) A should be, a Beta character where the B should be and so on. Some quirky mappings for Greek characters that have no equivalent in Latin alphabets, such as Phi,Chi, Psi and end-sigma, just pick any Latin char that has no equivalent in Greek. That's what people did. In the 1980s with ASCII being the only font table around. In this century, and with Logos, systems use UNICODE, which has more than 128 places in its code table and thus Greek alpha has its own place - which is empty in the old fonts (I also checked one free font that claims to emulate P39, same there).
Thus when you copy any English text from Logos into Word, and reformat to those last-century Greek-looking fonts, it will become gobberish but looking Greek, whereas when you copy actual Greek text from Logos to Word and reformat in those fonts, they come up blank.
On the other hand: even if you had such an antique-looking Greek UNICODE font, it wouldn't be the same. Greek bibles now use punctuation, spaces between words and sentences, and spell out words that scribes in antique times would abbreviate (such as nomina sacra like theos, christos and others). A heavily customized visual filter might help to emulate those. But in the end: if you plan to sight-read Greek manuscripts, maybe the way to go would be to look at images of those manuscripts rather than to read NA28 in font that looks like a specific papyrus (after all, the next scribe's papyrus copy might look different again).
Have joy in the Lord!
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