The Trexler Library: Muhlenberg College

Greek Letters and Display

Current web browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome) should resolve Greek letters properly.  Accented Greek letters, however, may not be properly visible, especially if the browser’s default font size is size 10 or less.

If you cannot satisfactorily view Greek text in this web site change these options in your web browser:

• Increase your default font size in your web browser to size 12 or 14 or larger
• Choose a variable font: CG Times, Times New Roman, Garamond, or Book Antiqua.  Helvetica, Lucida, Verdana, and Arial fonts tend not to display Greek characters and accents properly.  One of the best fonts is Vusillus, if you have it
• Find a free Greek-Roman font. Some good candidates can be found here: http://www.1001freefonts.com/greek-roman-fonts.ph

This web site is presented to each user’s web browser using the encoding standard called UTF-8 (Unicode computer encoding for 8-bit character conversion and presentation).  This is a so-called “backward-compatible” scheme which will correctly present characters for most languages of the world (including Ancient Greek).

Ancient Greek text was rarely accented –sometimes only breathing or marks for emphasis were added.  (This is called monotonic Greek.) Later generations of Byzantine and Western scholars added accents and breathings (using so-called polytonic Greek).  They added such markings to make certain Greek words and combinations of letters clearer and to remove ambiguities.  Accents and breathings can occur in combined patterns which challenge not only the eye but the text’s editor.