alpha/greek font

[jen0dorf]

Hi

does anyone know where I can get the greek alphabet ?

I need the Alpha (lowercase) ie "fish shape".

thanks

Ian

[stratocast]

Hope this helps.

[jen0dorf]

Thanks after lunch I'll have a look. I'm trying to recreate the "alpha" to use as part of a logo for a charity

cheers

Ian

[The Alien]

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/greek.html
α

It's supposed to work if you type ALT+945, but that doesn't work for me :shrug:
Just copy & paste it in Xara

(Also, the greek letters look very abstract in Verdana, so use another font )

[Soquili]

If you use one of Windows Open Type fonts you can get the lower case Greek alpha by hold down the Alt key and using the numeric keypad and entering 0945. Windows 2000 and newer requires 4 digits to be entered for a character.

The fonts available on the forum produce the ± symbol, which is also what is produced using a Windows True Type font.

If you use the Windows Symbol font and type a lower case a you will also get a very nice looking Greek lower case Alpha.

[stratocast]

Yes, it is frustrating that you cannot use the character codes above 255 in Windows or rather you can use them, but you don't know what you are going to get above 255.

The Symbol font is handy, but you are stuck with it if you use it. I occasionally have a use for Greek letters in various typefaces, so I made the alpha.xar file which contains the Greek alphabet in Arial and I can change the font to any other that contains Greek letters.

Of course it's still a copy and paste job. If I need a lot of Greek, then I change my keyboard mapping and use a suitable Greek font ...or better still get one of my Greek friends to do it on their computer.

[The Alien]

I don't quite get it though. If ALT+0945 gives ± instead of alpha, then what key combo does produce the alpha? Surely there must be a key combo for it
And ALT+945 gives this --> ¦

This is weird. Sorry, but it's getting a bit OT too

[Soquili]

Hi Alien,

There are many types of fonts. Windows has two current versions, the older (original) True Type and a newer Open Type True Type font.

In the older font using the Alt+0945 you get the ± instead of the Greek lower case Alpha character.

In the new font using the Alt+0945 you get the α Greek lower case Alpha character.

Using Alt+945 is interpreted differently by Windows than the Alt+0945. You would have to consult Microsoft to find out why they do that

The attached image shows the two different icons used for the older True Type and the Newer Open Type fonts when using the Control Panel Fonts applet.



Fonts are like hugh tables that contain the information to draw a character on screen or a printer. Different systems exist to interpret which numbers represent the information for each character. That is why you get different characters using the same key combinations like Alt+0945 if you use a different font format (old True Type or newer Open Type). The Windows Open Type is different to some extent than the other Open Type fonts available for the Mac.

[stratocast]

Hi Bill,

Yes, you're correct about the True Type and Open Type fonts, but I don't think that it's the whole story. Even using Open Type fonts, Alt+0945 for instance, still gives the wrong symbol. I've done some research into this and after wading through pages of dry, incomprehensible technospeak, frankly I'm none the wiser. Except that it appears not to be as simple as using the correct font type. The application you are using has to support the higher character codes of Unicode too.

You'd think that if there was one application that could deal easily with Unicode it would be Microsoft Word (I have Word 2003) and it does. Enter Alt+0945 and you get a Greek alpha character. Wordpad also produces the correct result. But, they are the only applications on my computer that do!

In general, Windows seems incapable working successfuly with character codes above 255 (the old ANSI limit), and as far as I can see the only way to get at these higher Unicode characters at the moment is to use a utility designed for the purpose. Which inevitably means copy and paste.

It's all very depressing and I would love for someone to chip in with the answer and put me out of my misery.

[The Alien]

Thanks for the info, guys
I've been confused over something like Bob mentioned: my Verdana font is .otf, and typing ALT+0945 gives ±. But using copy & paste, you can paste the alpha in the message textbox here on the forum. This means that the alpha letter does exist in Verdana. This would mean that there's a key combo to type the alpha with (instead of copy & paste).
If the alpha character was simply not there in Verdana (instead, there would be the ± in its place), one would expect that when you paste the alpha here in the message text box, it would show as ± instead