Add Greek character set

[chrissimpkins]

No description provided.

[corelon]

Hello. This looks like a great font. I was wondering. Would it be better to base the font of DejaVu which includes all the character sets mentioned (I am mainly interested in Greek)? That is if it is not very different from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

[chrissimpkins]

Check out the development branch ;)

I just got started on it last night and have included most of the new glyphs in the regular set to date (including the Greek character set from DejaVu). They need a bit of spacing work and I am going to correct some curve issues, include the changes to terminals and punctuation chars so that they are consistent with Hack. There are a few other minor adjustments that are already in the Latin set that I need to include to keep it consistent. Hope to have this version out soon.

DejaVu Sans Mono is based on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and the developers kept the metrics of the original. They fit together very well.

Will let you know when the binaries are ready. Thanks for the nice comments. I appreciate it!

On Jul 14, 2015, at 2:13 PM, Nikos Tzanos notifications@github.com wrote:

Hello. This looks like a great font. I was wondering. Would it be better to base the font of DejaVu which includes all the character sets mentioned (I am mainly interested in Greek)? That is if it is not very different from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

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[chrissimpkins]

Also, it would be very helpful to get your feedback as someone who writes with Greek characters once this is out. If you are willing to stay involved in the project, we can work to correct any problematic issues in that character set.

[corelon]

Thanks for the info and the work. You can count me in for the help

[chrissimpkins]

Excellent, thanks much!

[corelon]

My pleasure! What is the best way to build the fonts myself?

[chrissimpkins]

the source is in a UFO format which you can open with Font Forge to build the binaries

On Jul 14, 2015, at 5:52 PM, Nikos Tzanos notifications@github.com wrote:

My pleasure! What is the best way to build the fonts myself?

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[chrissimpkins]

Test binary that includes a fresh import of DejaVu Sans Mono Greek glyphs is now available in the build/test_builds directory development branch. The current test version is 2.001.

The Greek character set is fully functional but needs work. Feel free to play around with it and let me know if there are any obvious problems at this stage. Once I have a test ready version with my changes/updates/improvements, I will let you know.

[corelon]

Many thanks I will try them out and let you know

[corelon]

From a first pass this look pretty fine. As you can see from the screenshot ΰ and ΐ somehow they are raised and look like superscript.
I can confirm this is the case with DejaVu Sans Greek glyphs. I tested with Roboto Mono and it works OK so this is not a software issue. If you can fix that as well that would be awesome. And I guess I should also report that to DejaVu as well.

[chrissimpkins]

Will get this fixed. I can see these characters and they are definitely not positioned correctly.

It looks like there are several characters that float up off of the baseline like that in the set. Are there any non-superscripted Greek characters that should do that? They are all characters that have diacritical mark characters above them.

Here are a few examples:

[corelon]

None of them should do that to my knowledge. And from what I see in the screenshot some of the diacritics are one on top of the other while there are combinations that I have not seen in text before. Most of these (apart from the ones I show in the screenshot) are from the greek extended which covers ancient greek text as well. Maybe when I can convince my wife to take a look (she is a linguist) she could help with the extended text a bit more.

[chrissimpkins]

Little did she know that she's going to get pulled into an open source project... :)

It would be extremely helpful to know what characters are in common use for modern text, source code in particular. Ancient Greek characters that are only relevant for historical texts can be safely dropped and will reduce the size of the font binaries.

Thanks much for all of your help. This is incredibly useful. I will pull together a contributors list for the upcoming release and acknowledge your contributions to the project.

[corelon]

Indeed! I will need to find a way to involve her :)
As for the modern greek characters that are commonly used both in free texts as well as code (comments) are the ones in the comments which I put here (you will need a font with greek support for these):

Lower case: αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρσςτυφχψω (σ in the start/middle of a word and ς in the end)
Upper case: ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩ
Lower case with diacritics: άέήίύόώ ϊϋ ΰΐ
Upper case with diacritics: ΆΈΉΊΎΌΏ ΪΫ

I hope I helped.

[chrissimpkins]

This is great. Thanks much. I worked on the Cyrillic set last night and will get started on the Greek set today. We will prioritize a usable version of these characters with this release and can work on the others when/if we have more information about the need to include.

[chrissimpkins]

The new regular set build (v2.002) includes the updated basic Greek character set. It includes all of the characters that you listed above. The upper and lower case tonos and dieresis characters should all be aligned properly now.

Question: are upper case characters with the single tonos ever aligned to the right of another upper case character? In the fixed width typeface, these accents tend to extend out of the em box so they may run into other characters that have strokes that extend in the upper right corner of the box (e.g. M).

Let me know what you think and whether anything appears to be missing and/or not properly aligned. Thanks!

[chrissimpkins]

Another question: is there enough of a difference between the upper and lower case theta characters? Is one case typically more rounded than the other or is the shorter horizontal stem that does not extend to the outer curve enough to distinguish these?

[chrissimpkins]

Link for my own future reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_diacritics

[corelon]

Thanks a lot for the quick response. In handwritten text there usually is a difference between the lower and upper case theta character, but usually not so much in fonts (unless they are some kind of script font which imitates handwriting.
As for the upper case characters with tonos ever being on the right of another letter that, normally, is never the case. I have seen this in printed text, but it is a mistake.
Upper case with tonos is only of the beginning letter of a word either because it is a name or at the beginning of a sentence.

I will try out the new version and tell you if there is any issue with alignment.

Thanks again :)

[corelon]

Just did a quick test now and everything seems to be working superbly.

[chrissimpkins]

👍

[chrissimpkins]

I made some additional modifications to the Greek set that will be included in the release version. I am still working on the other character sets and then will move on to the bold, oblique, and boldoblique sets. I will post in this thread when the entire typeface is out in a release version.

[chrissimpkins]

In handwritten text there usually is a difference between the lower and upper case theta character, but usually not so much in fonts

This is very helpful. Thank you!

[chrissimpkins]

Test build for the bold set is now available:

https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/raw/development/build/test_builds/Hack-Bold.otf

[chrissimpkins]

Starting a new issue with test builds for the upcoming release. They will now be posted in #14.

Will continue discussions about any issues with the Greek character set here.

[corelon]

Thanks a lot. I have already installed them and started using them to find and potential issues.

[chrissimpkins]

Available as of the v2.010 release which has been merged into the master branch of the repository.