Writing Greek and Hebrew with Unicode Fonts

Holger Szesnat
18 March 2010

1 Introduction
The Pacific Theological College is in the process of making the use of unicode fonts for
dissertations / thesis obligatory, particularly if a student wishes to write Greek or Hebrew
characters. This will make long-term electronic storage of such theses easier. The
following comments explain how to use unicode fonts to write Greek and Hebrew.

2 Unicode: the basics

Unicode has changed the way in which computers handle different typefaces / fonts. This
has implications for theological studies in that unicode fonts make typing different
languages in the same document easier (such as English, Greek, and Hebrew). To
understand how this works, we need a brief history lesson.

Until a couple of years ago, Microsoft Windows users (that is, the majority of computer
users in the world), used a fairly straightforward set of typefaces or fonts. As long as one
wanted to write in a single language, that was no problem: you picked a font to do this
with, and that was it. If you wanted to write in Greek as well as English, you had to
“change fonts”. Fine, up to a point, but if you wanted to share a document (eg. make a
handout available to students) that became a problem, for all users would need to have
access to precisely those fonts used by the writer.

All of this has become easier with unicode. Unicode is, in a nutshell, a single system for
representing (in theory) all character sets of most known writing systems. Each character
is assigned a certain number, and it is that number which is embedded in the document.
Therefore, as long as you use a unicode font (and it does not, in principle, matter which
one) you should be able to see the same characters – in a different typeface, perhaps, but
still the same characters. Greek alpha (α) will be Greek alpha (α) even though I may use a
font/typeface different from that of the original writer of the document (in this sentence, for
example, the illustration is by means of switching between Arial and Palatino Linotype.

More importantly, some programmes now explicitly rely on the user having a unicode font
installed in order to display non-Latin character sets like Greek or Hebrew; for example,
Diogenes is natively written for unicode output, though it can use other fonts as well:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes

It is therefore useful to install a couple of unicode fonts on your system, especially if you
plan to
• write with Greek or Hebrew words or sentences;
• distribute electronic texts, such as student handouts;
• make use of more recent bible software.

3 Where do I get unicode fonts from? What do they look like?

Depending on what programme your computer has installed, you may find that you have
certain unicode fonts available already. Others may be downloaded for a fee, or free of
charge. Some common options include:
(Writing Greek and Hebrew with Unicode) 2
3.1. A very good, free unicode font is Cardo,
Cardo by David Perry. This is the font I tend to use at
present when I want to write Greek or Hebrew characters. Cardo was designed for Greek in
the first place, but it also supports Hebrew: http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html . It represents
Greek thus: Ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ µετὰ πάντων. Hebrew text looks like this:
‫שׁמַי ִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶ ץ׃‬
ָ ּ ַ‫בְּרֵ אשִׁית בָּרָ א אֱלֹהִים אֵת ה‬
As you can see, both Greek and Hebrew look quite nice – it’s just a pity that the representation
of Latin characters that we use for English does not look quite so attractive.

3.2. The Society of Biblical Literature offers a Greek and a Hebrew unicode font – sadly
not together, but as separate fonts:

SBLHebrew http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx. Hebrew

a. SBLHebrew:
text looks like this:
‫ֹלהים ֵאת ַה ָשּׁ ַמיִ ם וְ ֵאת ָה ָא ֶרץ׃‬
ִ ‫אשׁית ָבּ ָרא ֱא‬
ִ ‫ְבּ ֵר‬
b. SBLGreek: http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLGreek.aspx . It represents
Greek thus: Ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ µετὰ πάντων.

Both SBL fonts are well done and certainly worth using.

3.3. Microsoft Office is often shipped with Palatino Linotype, a commerical unicode font
which has a basic range of Greek and limited range of Hebrew characters. It represents
Greek thus: Ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ μετὰ πάντων. Hebrew looks like this:
‫תיׁשא ֵר ְּב‬
ִ ‫ַּׁש ַה ת ֵא םיהִלֹ ֱא א ָר ָּב‬
ָ ‫׃ץרֶ* ָה ת ֵאוְ םיִמ‬
As you can see, the Greek looks good, and the Hebrew at least ok, although some vowel
signs appear to be out of line. Worse, however, is the fact that the right-to-left direction
sometimes messes up the text, as above, and I have not yet found a simple way of
addressing that. Greek is fine though.

[Another font that comes with many Microsoft products is Arial. This is not a unicode font.
Microsoft does offer a nice, large fontset called Arial Unicode MS with some products,
however – but this is a commercial font that has to be paid for.]

3.4. Other free unicode fonts for Greek and Hebrew include:
• TitusCyberbit,forbothGreekandHebrew:http://titus.fkidg1.uni-
TitusCyberbit
frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp.
• Gentium:
Gentium http://scripts.sil.org/gentium, does Greek well, but it does not include Hebrew
characters.
• EzraSIL (see http://scripts.sil.org/EzraSIL_Home ), This font does not include the Greek
set; however, the system seems to switch to Gentium automatically when required to
express Greek.

4 Unresolved issues
As you can see in the examples above, switching between Greek, Hebrew and English
can result in changes to line spacing. Also, if you stay within the same font point size,
some unicode fonts represent Greek and Hebrew in rather small characters. Another issue
that is as yet unresolved for me is that most available unicode fonts are serif fonts (such as
(Writing Greek and Hebrew with Unicode) 3
Cardo). The current wisdom on making documents accessible for a wide range of readers
suggests using a sans-serif font instead, such as Arial (used in this document). Still, for the
time being, my choice would be Cardo,
Cardo because it includes both Greek and Hebrew sets.
The next best option, in my view, would be the SBL fonts.

5 How do I install fonts?

Fonts usually come with the filename extension “.ttf”. Place this file temporarily on your
desktop, or somewhere where you will be able to find it again. You now need to install this
font.

On Windows systems, fonts can be installed thus: Click on START, then CONTROL
PANEL. Wait for the control panel to load, then choose FONTS. Wait for that to load, then
flick on FILE in the menu bar (top left), and choose INSTALL FONT. Locate the new font,
and install it. (Note: this description works for Windows XP and olders systems, but it is not
all that different, I believe, for Vista or Windows 7.)

Once installed, the original font file can be deleted or, better still, archived on your system.
If you have a system crash later on, you can easily re-install it if need be, assuming you
have backed up your system beforehand.

6 Character input: Greek

If you want to type in Greek (as opposed to just cutting and pasting from other
documents), there are a number of ways to achieve this. I will just describe the most
simple way.

The really quick fix option for typing unicode Greek

There are three ‘quick fix’ options for typing Greek in unicode if you have access to the
internet. Apart from making sure that you have a unicode font for Greek / Hebrew on your
system, you do not need to install or change anything.

http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Etayl0010/polytonic-greek-inputter.html
http://johndyer.name/post/2007/08/Greek-and-Hebrew-Unicode-Keyboards-in-HTML.aspx
http://www.typegreek.com

The first option (http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Etayl0010/polytonic-greek-inputter.html ) is, in my

view, the quickest and easiest way of typing Greek.

Given that you might not always have access to the internet, I would strongly recommend
that you download that page to your computer. Once it has loaded in your browser, click
on FILE, then SAVE PAGE AS, and make sure that the ‘save as type’ option “Web-page,
complete” is selected. Save it to a convenient location on your computer. It will recate a
HTML file as well as a folder with the same name with further files that the page needs. In
order to use it, all you have to do is double-click on the HTML file, and it will come up in
your browser.

7 Character Input: Hebrew

Hebrew character input is a bit more complicated than Hebrew, largely because of the
greater variety of consonants, vowel signs, and cantillation marks, but also because of the
right-to-left writing issue.
(Writing Greek and Hebrew with Unicode) 4
Once again, I recommend the quick and easy route: if you have ready internet access, two
options present themselves:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051130024013/www.amhaaretz.org/translit
http://johndyer.name/post/2007/08/Greek-and-Hebrew-Unicode-Keyboards-in-HTML.aspx

I recommend the first option. Again, I would also recommend that you download that page
to your own computer in the same way I described this for the Greek ‘in-putter’.

One helpful function of that page is the ability to switch between left-to-right and right-to-
left systems. For reasons too tedious to explain here, it is sometimes necessary to write
the Hebrew text on the web-page
(http://web.archive.org/web/20051130024013/www.amhaaretz.org/translit ) first, and then
to reverse the characters with a click on the button provided, before you copy it to your
Word document.

8 Complete texts (in unicode) of the Greek / Hebrew scriptures

Sometimes is may be useful to copy and paste a particular section of text rather than re-
type it entirely. This is possible in two ways:

8.1 The easier way is to download word-files with the texts from this website:

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/fonts

8.2 A slightly more complex, but perhaps more elegant way is to download a WORD
macro utility called ‘Insert Bible’ written by Michael Stead:

http://stead.streetlinemedia.com

9 More information
More links to fonts (both Greek and Hebrew, usually) may be found at
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Hebrew.html

There is extensive information on unicode and writing in Greek (and to some extent,
Hebrew) on Rodney Decker’s website: http://www.ntresources.com/unicode.htm

Another useful page is David Instone-Brewer’s information on unicode at the Tyndale

website: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/fonts .

Also useful: http://www.biblicalgreek.org/links/fonts/keyboard.html

The information provided on some of these websites is far more extensive and at times
more complicated than what I discussed here. Some of them (eg. David Instone-Brewer)
also discuss more tricky issues like switching to ‘right-to-left’ text-entry for Hebrew, and
proper word-wrapping in that context.