[biblitfonts] Re: New Greek characters in Unicode 4.0

John,

I think it's certainly appropriate to add these characters so that the
SBL font will support all the official Unicode Greek characters.

Sho/sho is only for Bactrian when written in Greek script.  Michael
Everson has some thoughts about the design of this character at
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2411.pdf .  The uppercase clearly
should be a Phi minus its left half circle, while the lowercase requires
some thought, as he indicates.  I like his solution of basing the lc on
rho.

Lowercase lunate sigma is generally a reduced version of the uppercase;
same shape.  It's true that nowadays one sees few editions printed using
lunate sigma, but there have been many such over the years.  I recall
that a few of the books I used in college were printed this way.

San/san is the hardest one.  It is only used in transcribing
inscriptions.  In a great many fonts, M/Mu has a central point that
descends quite low, to the baseline or almost that low.  So one can
distinguish San from Mu by having a central point that does not go very
low, as in the example on the Unicode web site.  (In a font designed for
epigraphy, San would have a full-length right leg while Mu would have a
short right leg; this was the original distinction between the two.)
The lowercase san has to basically be invented by us, since there is no
precedent that I am aware of.  See the pdf file that I posted at
http://scholarsfonts.net/DesignSan.pdf .  This work was done under
considerable time pressure; I did not have luxury of playing with
various options and then leaving them to come back later, as I would
have preferred to do, so I don't claim that the shapes I came up with
are the best ones.  But they do work.  One person commented that the
final form of san I created looks like a cyrillic lowercase letter (sort
of a shrunken version of the capital; no separate personality of its
own).  I agree with this.  I'd say, John, that you should basically
design a san that relates to other letterforms that you already have in
the font.  If you design san with a descending left leg, it's easy to
connect it typographically with digamma, archaic koppa, and rho.

David

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