Saturday, September 13, 2008

Greek Legacy Fonts to Unicode Converters

Please see the UPDATED version of this post.
 Everyone should really be using Unicode for Greek fonts now, but there are still a few publishers who request Greek be rendered in one of the older legacy fonts. You may also have some older documents with non-Unicode Greek fonts, and you want to convert them to Unicode. The problem with the older TrueType fonts (e.g., Sgreek, SPIonic, Graeca, etc.) is that they each have their own character encoding, so there is no single way to convert these fonts to Unicode. What's the solution? I have gathered all the Greek font converters of which I am aware. Many of them allow conversion to/from Unicode. Note that it is possible to convert from a legacy font to Unicode back to a different legacy font if necessary.
Also note that most of the converters are Microsoft Word macros or templates. If you try to convert a file that has footnotes with Greek, the footnotes might not get converted.
Let me know if I missed any.

Greek Transcoder (Word document template) - excellent, free converter; handles the following fonts

  • Beta Code (Betaread)
  • GreekKeys (Athenian, Bosporos, Kadmos, Xanthippe)
  • Ismini
  • LaserGreek (GraecaII, GraecaUBS, GreekSansII, GreekSansLS, Hellenica, Odyssea _/F/UBS, Payne, Payne Condensed, SymbolGreekII, UncialII)
  • Paulina Greek
  • SGreek (SGRead, SGreek, SgreekFixed)
  • SPIonic (SPIonic, Tadzoatrekei, Takeros, Talaurinos)
  • SuperGreek (Achille, Graeca, GreekSans, SSuperGreek, SuperGreek, SymbolGreek, UncialLS)
  • Vilnius University (Anacreon, Attica, Corinthus, Corinthus Lector, Grecs du roi, Greek Old Face V, Greek Grotesque, Hellenica, Hierapolis, Milan Greek V, Odyssea)
  • WinGreek and Son of WinGreek (Aisa, Angaros, Athenian, Grammata, Grecs du roi WG, Greek, Greek Garamond, Greek Old Face _/C, Korinthus, Milan Greek, Standard Greek)
  • Unicode

Galaxie BibleScript (Word macro/template)
  • Use the Windows Installer to Galaxie Greek/Hebrew fonts and Word template
  • Involves a two-step process converting legacy fonts to Galaxie fonts and then to Unicode
  • Greek fonts handled: Alexandria, Koine, Gideon, Mounce, Bwgrkl, SymbolGreekP, Graeca, WinGreek, GraecaII, SuperGreek, Sgreek (also Hebraica/II, Bwhebb, SuperHebrew, Shebrew)
BibleWorks BWGRKL > Unicode (Word macro)

Sgreek (from Silver Mountain; used in BibleWindows>Bibloi)

  • Bibloi 8.0 includes a Unicode Type Assistant for Sgreek ><>
SIL (Word template)

  • IPA93 legacy fonts (Doulos, Sophia, Manuscript) ><>
  • Check here
Meander's Nod (online)

  • GreekKeys (Athenian, Attika, Sparta, Salamis)
  • WinGreek
  • Bosporus(GreekKeys format)
  • Kadmos (GreekKeys format)
  • ISO 8859-7 (Modern Greek)
  • Beta Code
  • > Unicode, Beta Code, GreekKeys, WinGreek
Logos: Graeca/GraecaII > Unicode (within Logos program converting Word docs)

Multikey (Word macro)

  • Aisa
  • Logos Gramma
  • Athenian
  • OldGreekSerif
  • WinGreek
  • WP Greek Century
  • WP GreekTimes Ancient
  • MgPolAplaM
  • TimesTenGreekP
  • Kadmos
  • Grk

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing all this. It's good to know were to go for all these.

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  2. Good to have. I have included it on my blog.

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  3. Have you seen one that converts Greek Parse?

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  4. Ken Penner has an online converter too http://ocp.acadiau.ca/kpenner/convert.htm

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. My friend, you have no idea how long I've been looking for this kind of information, and finally I've found it!! Thank you so much!

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  7. Nice post, which is very useful and well-referenced on Google.
    Perhaps you should also mention Antioch, which is a Word plugin that does a good job of conversion from a variety of formats (LaserGreek, SuperGreek).

    There is a free version here : http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/antioch.htm

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  8. I found your this post while searching for information about blog-related research ... It's a good post .. keep posting and updating information. best-film-to-digital-converters

    ReplyDelete