Greek Typography Part 2

Earlier this year I wrote about efforts to do Greek typography properly, or at least try to. Aldus is famous for caring deeply about ancient Greek scholarship and for making the considerable technological strides to bring all that material into the new world of print. And so, in digitally remediating our Aldine collection, the least I can do is try to get it to show properly, as a first-class textual component, and not a poor cousin. In January I wrote about my discovery that your average font probably doesn’t have much support for Greek glyphs beyond what’s needed for a tenth-grade math textbook, but that if you look, you can find fonts with excellent – and even beautiful – coverage.

The immediate issue for us here is that we’re faced with mixed Greek and Latin (and by Latin I mean the Latin alphabet, including English and Italian, not just the Latin language) text. About a third of the Wosk–McDonald Aldine Collection are Greek texts, with Greek titles. In building the navigation for this site, and especially in the big list of books, we’re coping with two alphabets. This came to a head for me in the fall, when Alessandra put together a comprehensive list of the book with an attempt to nail down some usable short titles in both Latin and Greek (and Italian, where appropriate). For reasons I delved into in my last post, the titles of these books are often not easy: many of these book pre-date modern titling conventions; most of them have been translated enough times that there are multiple language variants; and some of the versions are too long to be useful, especially in a navigation role. Alessandra’s list made a move to address these challenges. But in mixing Greek and Latin together in one place, the typography issue became more glaring.

I realized what was needed was to break the Greek text out and mark it up accordingly, and then use CSS styles to assign a font to it that would do justice. Originally I thought that the Greek glyphs in the free EB Garamond font would do, but in playing around with it, I found that Juan Pablo del Peral’s Alegreya, available via Google Fonts, is actually even nicer: a ‘humanist’ typeface, which suggests that it still has a calligraphic orientation, but with more even x-height, so it pairs more nicely with the Latin text we’re running in the Aldine-derived ETbb roman.

Implementing that wasn’t too hard: it meant marking up “display-title-Latin” and “display-title-Greek” in the book listings, so that each could have its own typographic styles. So far this is implmented in the book lists and to a certain extent on the book info pages themselves, but I want to extend this to all Greek text on the whole site. And, for accessibility and screen-reader compliance, these will all have lang attributes so that accessiblity tools can recognize it as Greek. I have yet to figure out when the modern Greek “el” code is appropriate and when the “grc” might be, let alone when I need to tag “la” as well, but all these things are on the to-do-list yet as well.

Fun fact: did you know there are separate Unicode points (& glyphs) for roman numerals?

I discovered this today too, when I noticed that some of the roman numerals in our titles respond to italics and some don’t! The trick is: the regular capital letters I, V, X, C, and so on, as represented as part of the regular Latin alphabet (as they were in ASCII) are distinct from the Unicode points for dedicated roman numerals themselves – despite looking the same. “Unlike sequences of Latin letters, these symbols remain upright in vertical layout.”^[1] – which is to say that these things will behave properly mixed with Asian scripts. I don’t think I need to be concerned with Asian scripts on this website, but I do like that they stand up straight in an otherwise italic setting. Compare:

1498 Angelo Poliziano, Opera Omnia 𐫱 volume Ⅰ
1498 Angelo Poliziano, Opera Omnia 𐫱 volume ⅠⅠ

1498 Angelo Poliziano, Opera Omnia 𐫱 volume I
1498 Angelo Poliziano, Opera Omnia 𐫱 volume II

Which do you prefer?

Update Apr 1: I decided against those dedicated roman numerals. On mobile, I found that the font fallback does weird things, so I reverted them all to regular uppercase I.