Brill Epichoric Greek Font
A unique solution to render Greece’s archaic local scripts
Brill makes it a point of honour to support the world’s scripts according to the highest typographic standards for the benefit of all scholarship. We already provide the Brill Typeface at no cost for all to use (provided it is for non-commercial purposes – see the EULA).
After extensive research and testing we now offer Brill Epichoric to the world, not just to scholars of Greek epigraphy but to anyone interested, at the same conditions (see the EULA). Brill Epichoric is capable of rendering the local Greek scripts of the Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods on all main computer operating systems. John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks, who previously designed the Brill Typeface, was inspired by, among others, the high quality of the Hekatompedon inscription letterforms to produce a distinctive, highly readable and extremely versatile font, with unparallelled support of Greece’s local scripts. While no types can ever render all letterforms found in all inscriptions, characteristic local glyphs could be distilled from standard scholarly works such as L.H. (Anne) Jeffery’s Local Scripts of Archaic Greece and are now presented as a palette of forms for epigraphers to pick and choose from to render any Greek inscription in a typographic manner.
Features
1. Variant glyphs
The default plus variant letterforms add up to 358 – the number doubles to 716 if one also counts the right-to-left glyphs. The number of included punctuation marks (most are ancient) is 49; and there are 4 diacritics.
The letter Alpha has the most variant forms.
2. Both left-to-right and right-to-left glyphs of all letterforms
The so-called ‘Nestor’s cup’ inscription is fully sinistrograde.
3. Access to all variant glyphs via the Unicode Private Use Area
Depending on the computer operating system the user will either input the Private Use code for a variant letterform and convert that to the required character (Windows), or access the variant directly via the keyboard (macOS).
4. Standard Unicode Greek encoding
Available for all glyphs through the OpenType ‘character variant’ feature (experimental, supported by a few applications).
Thanks
Brill gratefuly acknowledges the invaluable scholarly advice offered by Prof. Nikolaos Papazarkadas (UC Berkeley, editor of Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum) and Prof. Sophie Minon (École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL).
Proceed to the non-commercial EULA page, where you will also find a download option (scroll down for the ‘I Agree’ link which will reveal the download link).