SBL Greek Font and XeTeX

Recently, the Society of Biblical Literature made the new SBL Greek font available for free. This unicode font is designed by John Hudson, of Tiro Typeworks, who also designed the SBL Hebrew font.

This is what the font looks like (picture from the SBL site).

The font contains 1341 signs, all you need to reproduce the text of the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint and the majority of the signs necessary for NT textual criticism. As this picture shows (displayed are default font, rare ligatures, variant 4, and variant 6, and samples of nomina sacra), the font offers variants of the thêta, rhô, the sigma as well as all you need to write nomina sacra.

Depending on the sofware you use to write, accessing the variants may not always be possible or easy. This gives me a chance to show how it works using X_ƎT_eX.

Glyphs and Variants

Of course, you have first to figure out the number of the variant. To do so on the Mac you can simply use the Character Palette or a similar tool in the sofware you use. You can also use this printout of the font. In this document the top number is the unicode number, the bottom one the glyph number. You can of course use this information to insert glyphs in your usual word processor if you do not use L^aT_eX or X_ƎT_eX, provided it is possible. I will let you figure out how to do it in your application.

A quick explanation may be necessary. In this context, and to be very simple, a character is an entity like a, b, c, etc.; a glyph is how these characters are actually represented. It is the image, the shape the character takes in your font. But a glyph can also be the combination of different characters. For example “ô” is the combination of the characters “o” and “^”. There are different ways of representing characters like a, b, c, etc. Thus the Greek sigma can be represented in different ways depending on its position and the date of the document. For more about this see glyph on Wikipedia. So back to our topic.

Glyphs and Variants in X_ƎT_eX

To insert a character in X_ƎT_eX by using its unicode number simply type

\char"#

where # is the unicode number. To insert a glyph just type

\XeTeXglyph#

where # is the number of the glyph.

For example, the code for the picture of the variants and the nomina sacra above is as follows. I have defined the shorcut \sbl to use SBL Greek in the preamble of the X_ƎT_eX document. If you use the variants multiple times in your document you can of course define shorcuts to use them in the preamble instead of using \fontspec each time.

{\sbl δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν}
{\fontspec[Ligatures=Rare]{SBL Greek} δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν}
{\fontspec[Variant=4]{SBL Greek} δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν}
{\fontspec[Variant=6]{SBL Greek} δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν}
{\sbl \XeTeXglyph895\XeTeXglyph957{} \XeTeXglyph897\XeTeXglyph957{} \XeTeXglyph903\XeTeXglyph952\XeTeXglyph940}

It looks complicated but sure is faster once you get used to it than clicking around a hundred times each time you need a special glyph, assuming your word processor will even let you work with variants.

The italic is yet to come in this font. In the meantime you can of course do italics, but your word processor will fake them. Basically it will take roman characters and slant them, i.e. distort them, to produce italics. Unfortunately some symbols for NT textual criticism are still missing from SBL Greek but should be integrated in the forthcoming all encompassing SBL BibLit font.

This is a comparison of textual criticism symbols in Cardo (bottom) and SBL Greek (top). The missing symbols are obvious.

• Download a printout of the font. Again, in this document the top number is the unicode number, the bottom one the glyph number.
• Download the SBL Greek font.
• Donwload the SBL Hebrew font. Download a printout of the SBL Hebrew font.
• See opinions on the SBL Greek font on Old in New or NT Resources.
• See also the thread on SBL Greek.