ANGULAR UNCIAL, BIBLICAL UNCIAL,  COPTIC UNCIAL, PAPYRUS UNCIAL,  ROUND UNCIAL, SLAVONIC UNCIAL, SLOPING UNCIAL,  MINUSCULE IX century, MINUSCULE XI century and MINUSCULE XV century: a set of 10 TrueType/OpenType fonts (digital typefaces) for Greek paleography.

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     If you're looking for fonts which imitate the writing systems used in old Greek manuscripts, you have come to the right place. ANGULAR UNCIAL, BIBLICAL UNCIAL, COPTIC UNCIAL, PAPYRUS UNCIAL, ROUND UNCIAL, SLAVONIC UNCIAL, SLOPING UNCIAL, MINUSCULE IX, MINUSCULE XI and MINUSCULE XV are the individual names of a set of ten fonts which I have recently designed. As their names denote, these fonts are representative of the main styles of Greek handwritings used during the Classical World and Middle Ages in papyrus and parchments.
   These fonts belong to the category known as facsimile level and they are intended to resemble the handwriting style of different Greek scripts as appear in manuscripts.
   The paleographic font package is a collection of fonts based on ancient and medieval calligraphy which include specialty characters, abbreviations, ligatures and alternate forms for some letters. These paleographic fonts can be used to represent ancient and medieval manuscripts in a "semi-diplomatic" fashion. That is, an edited version of the manuscript that preserves more features of the original document than is common in standard, normalized, modern editions. They allow the preservation of many original features, and can be used to help students become more familiar with ancient and medieval writing and languages without the expense of purchasing semi-diplomatic editions or facsimiles of manuscripts.
   This collection of fonts is suitable for students and scholars of historical sciences as well as desktop paleographical publishing. It may be of interest to students and professionals dealing with paleography, linguistics and ancient Greek.
   Doubtless this is the most authentic and useful of font packages currently available to medievalists.
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   The paleographic Greek fonts collection consists of 10 typefaces (Angular Uncial, Biblical Uncial, Coptic Uncial, Papyrus Uncial, Round Uncial, Slavonic Uncial, Sloping Uncial, Minuscule IX, Minuscule XI and Minuscule XV) closely based on historical models with the right virtues of the original being kept in focus, all with a solid grounding in type scholarship behind the effort, too.

   A)= Typefaces included in the Uncial class use as a source of their design the different Greek handwriting hands used from around the first century B.C. till the tenth century A.D. approximately.
   Here is a brief description of the different typefaces:

   1.- Handwriting on papyrus.
   ANGULAR UNCIAL is a digital replica of the handwriting employed in the Bacchylides papyrus, now preserved in the British Museum. The only evidence as to the age of the manuscript is that afforded by the handwriting. Guided by this Dr Kenyon assigns the Bacchylides papyrus to the first century B.C.
   ROUND UNCIAL is a close resemblance to the hand used in the so-named Hawara Homer, a papyrus (now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) from the second century A.D containing portions of the second book of the Homer's Iliad.
   PAPYRUS UNCIAL closely follows the so-called P66, which is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John and part of the collection known as the "Bodmer Papyri". It is one of the oldest New Testament manuscripts known to exist, with its writing dated to around 200 A.D.

   2.- Handwriting on parchment or vellum.
   BIBLICAL UNCIAL mimics the hand of the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, a Greek and Latin diglot, which contains the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Following Scrivener, scholars universally dated it from the beginning of the sixth century A.D., but there is a tendency now to place it a hundred years earlier. The Cambridge University Library holds the manuscript.
   SLOPING UNCIAL is based on the lettering showed in the Codex Washingtonianus, also called The Freer Gospel, which contains the four biblical gospels and was written on vellum in the 4th or 5th century A.D.
   COPTIC UNCIAL reproduces the style of handwriting known as "Coptic", which was used for Greek in some manuscripts such as the Codex Marchalianus (written in Egypt in the sixth century A.D.) or the Codex Vaticanus Borgianus (sixth century A.D.), for example.
   SLAVONIC UNCIAL, as its name denotes, imitates the style of handwriting known as "Slavonic", (since the Slavs took most of their alphabet from it). This style represents the late and final development of the Uncial handwriting and was employed in manuscripts like the Codex Boreelianus (ninth century A.D.).

   B)= Typefaces which fall within the Minuscule class (MINUSCULE IX, MINUSCULE XI and MINUSCULE XV) imitate the ordinary style of the Byzantine manuscripts, being closer imitations of the different Greek minuscule handwritings used from the ninth to the fifteenth century A.D.

   IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE: All the fonts are accompanied by their Roman counterpart matching the Greek face as best as possible. See images below.
   The fonts are edit-embeddable to permit the creation of Adobe Acrobat documents (PDF) and web pages with embedded fonts (the so-called "web-fonts": EOT, WOFF and SVG formats).
   The digital typefaces may be purchased individually or all together. Please read information below.

   The paleographic fonts collection for Greek is a series of fonts covering a number of codices and papyri from different ages.
   The fonts are provided in Unicode-encoded TryType or OpenType format. The Windows and Mac versions of the fonts are cross-platform compatible. Therefore they permit direct exchange of all their standard Unicode-encoded characters with any other Unicode font containing those characters on either platform.
   The paleographic font package contains the letters, breathing marks, accents and other special characters necessary to reproduce the standard character form text of codices and papyri.
   Please note that most of the ancient codices or papyri do not show (display) diacritics at all or seldom rarely, however, because many users may want to type the original hand, but also display the breathing marks and accents, the fonts include these diacritical marks.
   Another useful feature is the inclusion of nomina sacra, since the fonts contain extendible overstriking bars for creating titles and abbreviations occurring in most manuscripts.
   Hence with these fonts you can type faithful representations of the original hand of important early codices or papyri with Unicode-encoded Greek fonts.
   By using these fonts you can type text just as it was originally copied by its scribe.

   These are standard Unicode fonts (TTF/OTF format), so they can be used running any Windows version and any word processor.
   You can also use them running Linux. I have successfully tried them under Debian with OpenOffice.
   These fonts should be usable on Macintosh running OSX 10 or above. This is not a problem, since Mac recognizes PC TrueType/OpenType fonts without complaint.
   Some of the fonts contain OpenType features (discretianory ligatures, alternate glyphs, historical forms, stylistic alternates etc.), therefore you will need an application (Word 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 or 2021, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Mellel, Illustrator, TextEdit, Nisus Writer etc.) which supports and handles the OpenType technology to take advantage of such feautres. See the User's Manual linked below for more details.
                                                                                                                          

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   These fonts are based on medieval and ancient Greek lettering styles. For this reason they may not include all the characters you may expect and, in contrast, may include specialty characters (nomina sacra, ligatures etc) or strange alternate forms for some letters. You can access those special characters present in the fonts through programs which support OpenType features (Word 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 or 2021, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Mellel, Illustrator, TextEdit, Nisus Writer etc.) or by using a character map (or even with the clumsy method of Insert/Symbol command) since they have been assigned codepoints in the so-called Private Use Area of Unicode. Please read the following document for further details about signs present in the fonts and OpenType issues.

   For more details on handwriting Greek systems and further information about these fonts including more visual examples, please read the User's Manual (PDF format, 71 pages) you can download below.                                 

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