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The Holy Typography: On Greece

The following are the introductory remarks to a panel on Greek Typography during the November 1995 Symposium at Harvard of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA). The panelists were Jeffrey Rusten of Cornell University, Matthew Carter of Cambridge, and George Matthiopoulos of the Greek Font Society (GFS) in Greece.

You will have noticed that the MGSA symposium contains kaqe kardudias karudi-every walnut tree's walnuts as they say in Greek. Indeed, unthematic was the way the MGSA symposium was structured. However, our panel appears to be the only one covering a universal theme -a theme that relates to the processing of text with Greek letters primarily for screen use and desk top publishing. In fact, it even goes beyond this symposium themes since it also addresses Greek writing and publications by classicists.

Had there been adequate, aesthetically pleasing and universal facilities to write Greek in the electronic era, we would not be here talking. Both Jeff Rusten and I feel that each in his own way entered this enterprise to fill a vacuum; we wish that this vacuum did not exist since it does take time that would otherwise be devoted to our respective disciplines. Yet we should not complain too much for in the process we came to know a world we did not know existed: the fascinating world of typography and its practitioners.

Among us four, the professionals are Matthew Carter, a well known type designer and scholar who has also designed Greek fonts, and George Matthiopoulos the graphic artist of the Greek Font Society and a dedicated typographic buff. You will hear from both.

This panel was organized specifically to summarize the events at the international symposium on Greek Letters: From Pixels to Tablets, that the Greek Font Society organized this last spring in Greece; it was hosted by the Institut Français d'Athènes.

A few words on the raison d'être of the Greek Font Society are in order.

The society was started after a quick feasibility study in Greece on the facilities available to the average computer-literate scholar to write his notes, books or whatever in mixed Greek and non-Greek type. We soon found that a key element was the availability of good quality type fonts and the specifications for keyboarding of texts in computers.

When I started the non-profit society in Greece I was completely ignorant of typography, letter design, and electronic publishing. For advice I turned to D.J.R. Bruckner, an editor of the New York Times Book Review, who has also written a well known book on Goudy-the famous American letter designer. Bruckner suggested that I contact some people in the Boston area. Matthew Carter, then a vice-president at Bitstream, was one of the first I met through David Godine, the well known publisher who is enthusiastic about Greek letters. Thus, the branching into the field of typography began. By now the tree has many branches and is also bearing fruit.

One of the suggestions of Bruckner was that we should seek out an artist-engraver since according to him good letters did originate from the practitioners in engraving. This had an immediate impact on the choices and approaches we followed in Greece. We indeed have the consulting services and active participation of an artist-engraver who helped our graphic designer to experiment and design Greek letters with the support of computers. A sample of our work commissioned by the Athens Archaeological Society is shown at the end.

After three years of work we reached a point in our learning curve where it became necessary to acquire a wider perspective of what we were doing and to decide what we should be doing in the future. This is the reason we organized the international symposium in Greece that covered the use of the Greek alphabet from antiquity through the electronic era.

I believe the key to the success of this symposium was the realization that all the basic Greek typographic letters until very recently have been cut by Italians, French, Dutch, Germans and British. It was therefore an opportunity to involve the various cultural institutions of the respective countries and obtain their moral and financial support which was absolutely essential. Table 1 shows the structure of the symposium in which 25 papers were presented by authorities in their respective fields.

An interesting session was on "the economics of QWERTY." One of the speakers, Nikos Panayotakis, the director of the Istituto Ellenico in Venice, gave a passionate speech where he concluded dramatically by saying that the monotonic was legislated in Greece not as a result of a well thought out study by professionals and intellectuals, but as a result of the pressure from the newspaper publishers who (before the advent of the computer facilities) argued that the polytonic was adding an enormous cost to their businesses. This comment is startling but, surely a valid argument suggesting how important the economics of QWERTY are. [The title of the session on QWERTY has been inspired by the well known work of Paul David on "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" which is getting some attention in recent years in reference to development economics.]

With the development of the internet, electronic mail and all the electronic transfer of text there are serious problems with Greek letters. Surely you must have seen the abominations of the Greek users where the letter y turns up as the number 3, and so forth. One, of course, learns how to read these texts, but can you imagine a fully accented classical text transmitted on the internet? Only last week, John Maddox, the editor of Nature, was complaining about the "known technical difficulties of transmitting illustrations efficiently." He added: "It is less appreciated that even text containing letters of the Greek alphabet and the most common mathematical symbols become garbage if launched into the internet without sophisticated precautions against corruption. They need cumbersome software packages." Therefore, availability of alphabets in Greek is not enough. These issues are now addressed by engineers but our society should be alert to technical developments. It is for this reason that a session was devoted to UNICODE, a subject that should attract the attention of engineers, who will hopefully be assisted by classical scholars.

The objective of the symposium was to gather experienced specialists who would profit by listening to tutorials on the subject of Greek letters, see what our society has done this far, and suggest where we should go from there. Indeed, during the round table discussion of the last day-that resembled the visiting committee in a department of an American university-the upshot was that we should liberate ourselves from the shackles that Greek typography has been operating under. Moreover, we should seek inspiration from the art of calligraphy, instead of limiting ourselves to just stone cutting and engraving. This is a tall order, for calligraphy is not taught at schools anymore. We are now seeking inspired calligraphers to add to our consultants.

One obviously must listen to the worries about "the end of history." However, more immediate, if not imminent, is "the end of the book." One may ask why we are now designing letters and for whom. The answer is clear: if books survive, there will be good letters to print them with. But if they do not, then clearly the computer screen with sharper images and more pixels to the inch will demand better letters. No one yet has yet thought of a way out of the alphabet.