When looking at fonts, there are three things to consider: the encoding scheme
(which codes map to which letters), the form of the letters themselves, and the
kerning tables (which determine the spacing between letters). If you are getting
your Greek text from established sources, you have to make sure that the
encoding scheme matches the font. The other two considerations are more
aesthetic, but they can significantly affect readability. If the form of the
letters is right, they use consistent weight for different "strokes", and look
like something someone could draw with a pen or a brush while holding it at the
same angle for all letters. If the kerning is right, you don't notice the
spacing among letters; they look as though all letter pairs are equally close,
although they aren't. You know the spacing and letter forms are right when you
read the words and don't pay attention to the letters or spacing.
I basically like the shareware Greek fonts from Silver Mountain Software. They
have a web site at http://www.silvermnt.com/. These fonts are nicely weighted,
and use kerning (which isn't perfect, though -- for instance, AU in the word
AUTW are much too far apart, especially in large type). Silver Mountain also has
public domain fonts that use fixed spacing, but fixed spacing kills any font.
They also have Hebrew fonts, but I haven't used them (yo no hablo evrit).
I have looked at two other fonts which can be downloaded from the Web, the SP
Ionics fixed spaced font and the Mounce font. I'm not wild about either. Neither
has well weighted letters. The public domain version of the SP Ionics font uses
fixed spacing, which is automatically ugly. The Mounce font doesn't have good
kerning.
Does anybody know what the UBS 3rd edition of the GNT uses? I haven't seen
anything else quite as good. Many published books use Greek fonts that aren't
all that great.
Jonathan