Whether you’re a Times New Roman, Baskerville, Garamond, or Comic Sans kind of person, the fonts, or typefaces, we use can positively or negatively affect the way people perceive our writing. While font selection may seem somewhat novel to the casual typist, authors who have to mix Roman and non-Roman (e.g. Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Kanji et al.) characters into one document know that “simple” font selection isn’t always so simple. At Milligan, this is especially pertinent to Bible majors, for whom referencing non-Roman (esp. Greek and Hebrew) characters is often a necessity.
In the late Spring of 2006 I turned in my first major exegetical paper containing non-Roman characters—a tragically puerile reading of Romans 8:28–30, if you must know. After emailing the document to myself, printing the paper at the library and heading to class, I made the horrifying discovery that every Greek word in my paper printed as a series of garbled symbols not at all resembling the Greek script. Not wanting to encounter the same problem for my next paper, I set out to find the best way to type, save and print documents using non-Roman scripts. Now, half a decade (and a few biblical languages) later, I’ve decided to share my insights into using biblical language fonts to their fullest potential. The following is intended as a guide for students and faculty who use non-Roman scripts in their research and writing.
An Introduction To Unicode
The Problem:
Computers read numbers, not letters—and even at that, computers don’t read numbers so much as they read sets of ones and zeros that represent numbers. Traditionally, each letter in a text file was assigned a value between 0 and 128—corresponding to each possible numerical value in one byte of data. This system provided sufficient unique numbers for assignment of the entire Latin alphabet (in both cases), all Arabic numerals, and most common punctuation. If one wished to use a different character set (e.g. Greek), one would have to use a different font.