Gentium for OCHRE
By Miller Prosser, February 2015
While the Unicode consortium has provided much needed stability and consistency in the use of fonts and character codes, it is still rather difficult to find a single font that has a pleasing appearance and contains all the necessary character blocks and individual characters needed for the representation of every language. In our work with the transliteration of ancient languages, we have found Gentium to be a useful font. However, the version of Gentium provided by SIL lacks a few key Unicode characters. Gentium is distributed under an open source license that permits modification and distribution. We have chosen to add a few missing characters and modify the appearance of a few characters.
Added Characters
(n.B. The version of Gentium currently in use places the two cuneiform signs in the private use area, a hold over from before the establishing of the Unicode cuneiform blocks. Even now, very few fonts support the two cuneiform Unicode blocks. As the world begins to adopt these blocks, our intention is to update our version of Gentium to reflect the correct Unicode points.)
Modified Characters
Download our customized version of Gentium: GENTIUM.ttf
Click the link to open a new tab, then download the font file.
The OCHRE Data Service has created custom keyboard layouts for Macintosh to help transliterate both Hittite and Demotic texts. You can download these keyboard layouts here. They are appropriate for use with any Unicode font, but work best with the customized version of Gentium because it contains all the relevant characters.
Hittite: HittiteDictionary.keylayout
Instructions for installing these keyboards can be found HERE.