Re: [NTLK] [ANN] Greek Font (preliminary version)

From: Daedalus Guy (daedalus_guy_at_mac.com)
Date: Sat Jun 08 2002 - 22:49:32 EDT


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Paul--

Wow! What a wonderful PDF--I've never seen it before. Thanks for the link. I've only glanced at it, but will definitely take some time to read it. Maybe it will give me some insights on how to improve things.

As for the two Greek fonts you pointed out--the one he uses in the PDF really looks bad, and as you say, it's a commercial font that was converted, so I doubt it could be distributed. I've never seen the Athenian font you mentioned (and I remember scouring just about all the Newton websites looking for one a couple years ago). Is it at UNNA? I think I've checked there and haven't seen it.

Even if you can find it, the other question is--do you have to pay for it? It's fairly easy with the Newton Font Tool to convert a Macintosh Greek font for use on the Newton, but doing this is technically illegal (even if it's likely nobody would ever catch you) without an ok from the creator of the font. My purpose in making NewtGreek was to make a Greek Newton font that was free of legal hastles and free of cost (for everyone).

Finally, I'm a bit hazy about the Unicode thing. I tried to understand what Unicode actually is (in practical terms) by reading through the materials provided by Apple's Font Group, but it's kind of like wading through a paper on atomic physics--far too technical and detailed to be of much use to me. I mean, I'm still not exactly sure what Unicode is--is it a font encoding method? Is it for mapping characters to keys? What I really need is a simple introduction as to what Unicode is, and then **a detailed explanation of how to make a font using it.** It looks like the PDF you provided might have some info on this.

Thanks for the input! I've received a couple requests so far for the preview version of NewtGreek, and am getting really close to sending it out.

--Daedalus

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