John Baima of Silver Mountain Software has recently released v. 2 of his Silver Humana 2 font. For most readers of this blog it is of interest for its polytonic Greek face (and perhaps even for the Linear B Syllabary). The Greek glyphs are Greek Times Roman (i.e., as opposed to a Didot, Porson, New Hellenic, etc. style). There are also Hebrew glyphs included, but I have not explored them to any extent.
(Both photos below will enlarge to double size to show more detail if you right click and download them.)
The font is included with the Beta Export program designed to work with the TLG and PHI CDs. (Check with the author for other options for use with Mac OS, or on Windows apart from Beta Exporter, etc.)
This font has an extensive glyph set including characters from the following Unicode ranges. (Not all ranges are complete; the number in parentheses indicates the number of glyphs found in each range.)
Basic Latin (95); Latin-1 Supp (95); Latin Ext-A (113); Latin Ext-B (1); IPA Extensions (96); Spacing Modifier Letters (9); Combining Diacritics (107); Greek and Coptic (80); Cyrillic (94); Hebrew (82); Arabic (10); Greek Extended (234); General Punctuation (21); Currency Symbols (1); Letterlike Symbols (9); Number Forms (1); Arrows (3); Mathematical Operators (7); Misc. Technical (1); Geometric Shapes (3); Miscellaneous Symbols (47); Dingbats (3); Misc. Math. Symbols-A (3); Supplemental Punctuation (27); Alphabetic Presentation Forms (36; = more Hebrew glyphs); Linear B Syllabary (47); Aegean Numbers (1)
The following ranges are apparently also included, but the font utility that I am using to survey the font apparently cannot display them nor can my version of Word handle them (they do display in the Character Palette and can be entered in TextEdit): Ancient Greek Numbers (75); Ancient Greek Musical Notation (70); Ugaritic (?).
I think there are also some other glyphs that would display in Firefox 3.5, but I cannot manipulate them in any program that takes text entry. (Additional characters show up in PopChar when I switch to Firefox.) This reflects the limitations of application support,
especially for newer Unicode ranges, etc. The problem is not with the font. I do not have any of the “high end” programs (such as InDesign) that provide more robust font support. Nor do I have a working Windows box at the moment, so I can’t examine the font in FontLab.
In terms of my primary interest (Greek and NT), this appears to be a very serviceable font. It does not have the professional “polish” of Adobe fonts or of a beautiful polytonic Greek font like Gentium, but it is much better than my own Galilee Unicode.* There are some spacing irregularities that most users won’t notice, but a font designer or typographer will. Letter spacing is not consistent (especially in the “Latin”/English glyphs) and there are accent variations in size and spacing. (See the accompanying photo.)
(Photo above shows both the Greek and English faces, the Greek in regular, italic, bold, and bold italic; the English face is shown in the last paragraph of the photo.)
The newest version of the font now also has a digamma (U+03DD), majority text (U+1D510), and papyrus (U+1D513) symbol. (The first release of Silver Humana 2 did not have these three glyphs, so if you picked up a copy prior to July 10, you will want to get a newer copy even if the font name appears to be the same; it’s also now an otf font rather than ttf.) The font contains only the regular face (i.e., there is no drawn bold, italic, or bold-italic), but the OS-created “pseudo bold that you will get if you apply bold formatting is serviceable enough. The pseudo-italic (= oblique) is usable, but not pretty.
The Latin glyphs are sans serif (a slightly tighter version of Optima), so you won’t want to use it as a standard text font for most purposes–and the Latin glyphs aren’t a good match for the Greek glyphs (but again, they are better than the one in my Galilee font!). A Greek glyph that matched the Latin Optima-style glyphs would have looked like Herman Zaph’s Optima Greek, or in reverse, to match the glyphs in Silver Human, a Times New Roman glyph would be a better visual match. Most specialized fonts like this simply use an available English font and tweak the x-height to match the Greek glyphs; they aren’t intended to be used as a primary font, but every font must have them. (Font creation tools such as FontLab provide free type faces for such purposes.)
Additional polytonic Greek fonts are always welcome since there are so few of them. Silver Humana 2 extends the stable in a helpful way and also adds a number of specialized ranges for scholars.
[*My own Galilee font is now deprecated (by me!) in favor of the much better fonts that have appeared since I created it quite a few years ago. My font was also designed for the "good ole days" of CRT monitors and specifically for use in web browsers, but LCD monitors and better font support in web browsers have rendered that design unnecessary. Please don't use it as a "text font"!]
