I was checking the font repositories and found some new fonts that might be of interest to the linguistics/medieval/math crowd. But before that, I would like to define a new term LGC = Latin/Greek/Cyrillic font which refers to any font which includes the Latin, Latin-A, Cyrillic and Greek and a few math symbols. So many fonts include all three blocks, that’s a handy acronym for me.
One caveat is that Basic LGC fonts don’t necessarily include ALL LGC characters. For instance a font like Verdana may be missing IPA extensions, Cyrillic extensions and Greek extensions. The good news is that more fonts including the special characters are becoming available, and we’re getting freeware large fonts to fill in typographical needs like small caps and narrow characters.
- Arev Sans – A sans serif font with excellent LGC coverage including Latin/Greek/Cyrililc extensions, a good inventory of math symbols and other symbols/punctuation.
- Linux Libertine – A family of OTF fonts with separate fonts for bold, italics, small caps. Good LGC coverage. It’s also good to have a small caps font for Greek and Cyrillic, but it seems to be missing some of the phonetic characters.
- Marin Font – This font is notable for being a little narrower than others which is a nice change and has glyphs for the Cherokee block and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllables. It also includes a separate Small Caps font.
- Roman Cyrillic Std, BukyVede, KlimentStd from Kodeks German Medieval Slavicists Server – Bukyvede in particular includes a lot of historical Cyrillic characters and includes the Glagoltic characters. Kliment and Roman Cyrillic are LGC fonts which include other variations of the Glagoltic block. Latin and Greek are also included
- Quivira – I discussed this a few entries ago, but to repeat: Big font. Lots of scripts including LGC, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, Thai, Baybayin, Runic, Thai, Braille, some Indic…
- Sophia Nubian – a new Coptic and Nubian script font from SIL with Keyman keyboard utility (Windows). A Mac Coptic Unicode Keyboard is also available.
I should mention that SIL is an excellent source of freeware fonts for undersupported scripts. Here’s a list of the SIL fonts.
There are always more fonts out there so I recommend a periodic check of Gallery of Unicode Fonts and Alan Wood’s Font list periodically. You never know what you might find.
