On Greek Typography

Aldus cared deeply about Greek; this is the foundation stone of his whole project. The output of his press in its early years is devoted to the circulation of Greek scholarship in print, and the Aldine press continued to produce Greek editions long after his death, as the Wosk–McDonald Collection demonstrates. Indeed, one of the first major tasks Aldus set to do in the 1490s was the development of Greek type. He wasn’t the first to print in Greek, but his typographic developments were enormously influential.

In developing the typographic design for this project website, we took a different tack: we wanted to stick close to Aldus’ Roman typefaces: for their elegance, and familiarity. We spent some time considering the really excellent free typeface EB Garamond but ultimately settled on ETbb – a new version of the ‘Bembo’ face that was cut for Edward Tufte’s books and then evolved by typographers in the LaTeX world. ETbb looked right, and gave the project a solid connection to Aldus’ own printing.

But in further development, as we’ve wrangled the titles of Aldus’ Greek editions into our metadata, it’s become apparent that EBtt has no real support for Greek type, apart from the usual π, ø, and Ω stuff that’s in the old “latin extended” character sets. What I’ve found is that your web browser, failing to find Greek glyphs in the specified font, will pull from a default font (I think Times) and substitute that. And this is what we’ve been doing here, without really knowing it. Aldus would be ashamed of us, really.

I discovered that there is a lovely Greek within EB Garamond – indeed, one that looks kind of faithful to Aldus’ type (at least compared with the default Times’ Greek). So what to do about this? Is this a reason to abandon ETbb for EB Garamond? I remembered that the Aldine press itself made this move, later in the sixteenth century (see for example Reginald Pole’s 1562 De Concilio). Then again, we wouldn’t expect a “Bembo” font to include Greek glyphs – it’s the very essence of a Roman font. The same goes for Garamond. What we’re really seeing in the case of EB Garamond is instead just exceptionally high quality (and comprehensive) digital type design by Georg Mayr-Duffner and Octavio Pardo.

Ultimately, I think the right thing for us to do will be to properly tag all the Greek text on this website, so that we can reference it in CSS and assign EB Garamond for the Greek titles – even while keeping ETbb for the body type. There’s an accessibility reason to tag it properly too. And I think Aldus would approve.