Greek and Hebrew Fonts

For dissertations utilizing Greek and Hebrew, you are likely going to need another font. Times New Roman handles Greek reasonably well, but it's not perfect. It is preferable to use unicode fonts instead of legacy fonts because that is the direction technology is going. In the future you may not be able to read your legacy fonts, but unicode fonts ought to remain readable into the foreseeable future.

What’s the difference between Unicode and legacy fonts?

Unicode is not dependent on a particular font while legacy fonts display Latin characters as Greek or Hebrew. This was a quick solution to the challenge that personal computers were designed by English speakers but needed to be usable by the entire world (and by biblical scholars!). Not too many years ago globalization forced software developers to develop a common coding standard, which is called Unicode. At a practical level it means that conceivably one font could display all languages of the world (though in practice few fonts display more than a few very well—Arial Unicode MS displays a lot of languages but not particularly well). My first Bible program with Greek and Hebrew was Bible Windows, and it used legacy fonts. Then I got Gramcord, which also used legacy fonts, but they didn't play well with my Bible Windows fonts. Then I got Logos, which uses Unicode. When I open old papers from before my Logos days I can't read the Greek and Hebrew anymore unless I hunt down those old fonts and install them. It is really annoying. Now with Logos, or actually, more often, with BibleTime from the SWORD Project, I just copy and paste using unicode, and I should be able to read those files for the rest of my career unless a new coding revolution takes place.

What does that mean for you?

Accordance and BibleWorks still use legacy fonts (though I hear BibleWorks 8 uses Unicode--a great reason to upgrade!), and it works as long as you have their fonts installed, but I recommend converting that text to Unicode or copying from a Unicode Bible software program (or manually typing it in). If you don't want to pay for yet another program like Logos (I can't blame you), I highly recommend the SWORD Project, particularly BibleTime, which was originally designed for Linux but now has a Windows version will be releasing a Mac version soon (Mac users might be happier with MacSword). It doesn't yet allow you to do the sophisticated morphological searches of a Logos, Accordance, or BibleWorks, but it is free and allows you to download and read the ESV and the Westminster Leningrad Codex for free--it doesn't get much better than that for Hebrew (except for searching, but that will change in the future). For Greek there are fairly decent options (Rahlfs LXX with morphology and various Greek NT texts, such as Tischendorf's 8th edition with morphology, which varies from the Nestle-Aland 27th edition perhaps a dozen or so times). Even if you have a commercial Bible software program, SWORD's ability to hide Hebrew vowels and cantillation and Greek accents is really handy at times.

Useful Unicode Fonts

The SBL has two high quality fonts for Greek (SBL Greek) and Hebrew (SBL Hebrew). SIL also has some nice fonts for Greek (Gentium is the best) and Hebrew (Ezra SIL). The templates on this site are set up so that any Unicode Hebrew text automatically is set in the SBL Hebrew font. There is no need for you to change the font manually. The main difference between SBL fonts and SIL fonts, aside from their design, is their license. For academic use, SBL fonts are free. The minute you go to publish, though, the publisher must have a license agreement with the SBL. SIL, on the other hand, releases its fonts with an open license, so you don't have to have any agreement with them to publish using their fonts.