Greek font archive
Unicode fonts

This page provides a catalogue of Unicode fonts which are polytonic-Greek-capable, with links to download each font. Choosing the right font for you is a subjective matter. For my own purposes I have the following criteria, in two groups.

Criteria

For my purposes there are six essential characteristics which a font should possess.

• The font should exist in the four main faces, viz. roman, bold, italic, and bold italic.
• Circumflexes on Greek vowels should be hat-shaped, Porson-style, not tilde-shaped as depicted in the Unicode Consortium's documentation.
• The font should include code point 0323, "combining dot below", used to indicate uncertain letters which are partly missing or not fully legible in a manuscript.
• The font should be a serif typeface, not sans serif. (Some fonts use serif for the Roman alphabet and sans serif for the Greek, which is undesirable from the point of view of consistency.)
• On-screen hinting should be good (this is only important under Microsoft Windows).
• The font should contain both Roman and Greek alphabets, so that there is no need to switch back-and-forth between fonts in one document. In practice few Unicode fonts fail this criterion, though many of the GFS (Greek Font Society) fonts are tailored for Greek-only use.

Criteria that are not very important to me personally, but may be of concern to some scholars:

• Archaic Greek characters. I find that I have never needed any of these, except for digamma, which I have needed only rarely.
• Lunate sigma.
• Combining diacritics, as opposed to precomposed character-accent combinations.

Here is a comparison table based on my personal criteria, with details on licensing, some comments, and download links.