Greek

When you need to transliterate Hebrew and Greek it’s not always obvious how to enter some of the more unusual signs. Here is a list of these signs from the transliteration recommended by the SBL Handbook of Style (p. 25–29). I am leaving out those that are easy to type (a for α, b for β, g for ג, etc).

From time to time, or often depending on your field of work, you might have to type textual criticism signs in you paper, thesis, masterpiece, and what not. Oftentimes the problem is finding the signs and then entering them into your document. There are several ways to find them: websites, the Character or the Glyph Palette of your system and sofware, etc. There also several ways to enter them, some more practical than others.

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.

Publications

“Parole en marche : La Parole de Dieu hors des murs de l'Église,” Revue Réformée, lxiii/2–3 (2012): 71–82

“L’évangélisation dans le discours et la pratique des évangéliques francophones : une mise en perspective,” Perspectives Missionnaires 62, (2011/2): 42–48

To write in Greek in X_ƎT_eX is actually quite simple, especially if you use a font that contains all the characters needed to write in English (or whichever languages you use) and in Greek (like Gentium, Cardo, etc.). To type in Greek. The following instructions are specific for the Mac. If you use X_ƎT_eX on Windows or LinuxLes you just need to adapt the commands for choosing fonts to your environment. These instructions also apply to working with Greek from other periods or other ancient or other non latin languages, provided you use the appropriate font.