ZephGreek and ZephText

Question

Greetings to all TeX lovers!

I have been reading Xenophon's "Cyrus' Anabasis" these days in my free time. The book is from the Loeb Classical Harvard Library.

Usually I use Garamond to write my papers or other work in English and the standard Didot for Greek (Gulliver is also good for Latin script, but you need to purchase it). Yet, I would say that I prefer the glyphs from LCL. In the book it says that they use ZephGreek and ZephText.

I was wondering if there is a close substitute for TeX.

Answer 1

The Zeph fonts are based on 'Porson' Greek according to the information provided by Harvard University Press. But the Zeph* fonts themselves seem to be custom commissions for HUP for use in Loeb books. So I doubt you will find anything to give you identical results. If others have found the fonts attractive, you might find something inspired by them but I suspect that's going to be the closest you'll get.

For Greek, the Greek Font Society (GFS) provides a font based on 'Porson' which might be your best bet. The Greek Font Foundry offers an alternative.

GFS Porson is fully supported for use with TeX. A package is available from CTAN which provides both fonts and LaTeX support. The package is included in both MiKTeX and TeX Live as gfsporson. Reading the documentation, you might try something like this:

\documentclass[greek,british]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{gfsdidot,texnames}
\usepackage{gfsporson}
\newcommand{\greek}[1]{\foreignlanguage{greek}{\textporson{#1}}}
\begin{document}
The heights of the letters in the \LaTeX{} package supporting GFS Porson are adjusted to match the Latin fonts from GFS Didot.

Latin and \greek{dokim'h}.

\end{document}

I've used GFS Didot for Latin since the heights of Porson's Greek are set up to match the Latin script from Didot but obviously you could match Porson with a different Latin script if preferred. Like gfsporson, gfsdidot is available from CTAN and included in both MiKTeX and TeX Live.

Answer 2

On this site, you can read it was inspired by PorsonGreek. And the Greek Font Society created GFSPorson, available for use with LaTeX and XeLaTeX (exists in type 1 and open type formats) on CTAN. It's included with 7 other greek fonts in TeXLive as well as MiKTeX.