Version 21 July 2015. This manual assumes of the reader basic knowledge of the Unicode standard as it applies to Unicode Greek.
Athena Ruby is a comprehensive OpenType font for the publication of scholarly editions of Byzantine inscriptions. Named after a predecessor font, Athena, and Dumbarton Oaks Publications Manager Glenn Ruby (d. 2004), Athena Ruby is designed to represent Byzantine inscriptions in Latin and Greek. The character set includes letters, letter variants, ligatures, and decoration found commonly in coins, seals, weights, and other media, such as mosaics and frescoes. The glyphs are idealized replicas of letterforms found in the geographical area of the Byzantine empire, from approximately 325 to 1453. Designed as a Unicode-compliant OpenType font, Athena Ruby is suited to a broad range of print and digital publications, from simple, single-author publications to complex projects.
Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C., holds all rights to Athena Ruby and its documentation and tools, and makes the font available to the public for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We request that anyone using the font in a publication, print or digital, formal or informal, include the following acknowledgment (with the version number in parentheses, and if used in a digital publication a link to the Dumbarton Oaks website):
This publication uses the font Athena Ruby (ver. x.x), courtesy Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
The ca. 730 glyphs in Athena Ruby are intended to represent the major letterforms, punctuation, symbols, and decorations found in Byzantine inscriptions. The font incorporates glyphs that appeared in older, non-Unicode fonts developed by Dumbarton Oaks from 1986 through 2008, and introduces other Byzantine-era glyphs well attested in scholarly publications and from items from our collection. The characters were chosen with special attention to the needs of sigillographers and numismatists. No claim is made that the ensemble of characters is comprehensive, or that it reflects any scholar's opinion about the date and appearance of the various glyphs.
Athena Ruby has the Latin and Greek alphabets (normal forms, variants, ligatures); punctuation (modern and Byzantine); and symbols and decoration. To see a complete list of the glyphs, consult the database (HTML | XML), which includes citations to published examples, or the pdf presenting the ensemble of characters.
On the principle that minuscule letterforms would be anachronistic to its geographical, chronological, and cultural scope, the font has only uncial letterforms, bound to both upper- and lowercase keys. (This accords with the Unicode standard, which makes normative statements only about the encoding of characters, not their appearance.)
The only non-Byzantine glyphs allowed in the font are modern punctation marks – | , . [ ] : · and the combining underdot. Athena Ruby has glyphs in the following tables (in Unicode sequence): Basic Latin (61 points supported), Latin-1 Supplement (2 points), Spacing Modifier Letters (4 points), Combining Diacritical Marks (11 points), Greek and Coptic (49 points), Greek Extendend (167 points), General Punctuation (2 points), Number Forms (1 points), Geometric Shapes (1 points), Miscellaneous Symbols (1 points), Supplementary Punctuation (3 points), Ancient Greek Numbers (2 points). All other glyphs reside in the Private Use Area (PUA). Some characters in the PUA may eventually become candidates for standard points in Unicode.
Supported codepoints: U+0020-007C, 00A0, 00B7, 02C1, 02CA, 02CB, 02D9, 0300-03E1, 1F00-1FFE, 200C, 200D, 2180, 25CC, 2627, 2E09, 2E0A, 2E23, E100-E823, 10182, 10184
Athena Ruby does not support Greek characters that are not attested in Byzantine inscriptions. Thus, for example, it is missing the digamma (U+03DC), sho (U+03F7), and san (U+03FA). It also lacks the full set of ASCII characters.
Athena Ruby is a True Type-flavor OpenType font. It utilizes several complex OpenType features:
To get the most out of Athena Ruby, you may need to choose a software program different from the one you are accustomed to using. Or you may need to modify the way you use a familiar program. To understand the limitations of specific software environments, and for recommendations on best practices, please see below, Editing with Athena Ruby.
Download Athena Ruby. Go to the directory in which you saved the file and extract it. You do this usually by double-clicking on the file, or right-clicking on it and choose "expand" or "unpack". Find the newly unpacked font. The next step depends upon your operating system.
Right click on the font and select Install. Alternatively, find the drive where you have your operating system installed and copy the file to C:\windows\fonts.
Macintosh fonts are to be found in multiple directories, and many Mac users manage their fonts with Fontbook (part of the OS) or a similar program. (Apple's website provides a good expalantion on how to manage fonts on the Mac.) Copy the uncompressed Athena Ruby file to the directory of your choice, and use your preferred font management program to install the font. If you don't know about font management programs, try double-clicking on the file and then click "Install Font."
After Athena Ruby is installed, any open software programs will need to be restarted.
To enter new text in Athena Ruby, use any of the methods below.
If you already know how to type in polytonic Greek, you are already set to use the font. If you do not know how, you should install a keyboard driver.
The Macintosh OS (10.4 or later) includes a polytonic Greek keyboard driver. Open system preferences, choose language & text, then input sources. Choose Greek Polytonic. While there, you should make sure to turn on the Keyboard & Character Viewer, good ways to find specific characters. Unfortunately, prior to OS 10.4 (Tiger), polytonic Greek was not one of the options. For those on older versions of OS (and for those who run it, but are unhappy with the configuration of its polytonic Greek keyboard), a third-party driver in polytonic Greek should be installed. Try SophoKeys, a free keyboard driver.
For Windows XP and Vista, there is a Polytonic Greek keyboard driver already built into the operating system, but you must activate it. Microsoft has provided very detailed instructions with pictures here. Unfortunately, this driver's assignment of letters and diacriticals is difficult for many to memorize and use. Other Windows keyboards are listed here. Another alternative is MultiKey, which is not a true universal keyboard driver, since it works only for Microsoft Word and Classical Text Editor.
Athena Ruby straddles several code tables in the Unicode standard: Latin, Greek, Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks, and the Private Use Area. It will be helpful to have on hand a good palette or finder, to help you explore the font and get the characters you need. You will find this tool helpful even if you are accustomed to typing with a keyboard driver. Warning: most character palettes access advanced glyphs exclusively through the PUA. That is, you won't get Unicode-compliant text if you use glyph finders to copy ligatures and variant letterforms.
Windows operating systems have a small but powerful program called Character Map, which allows you to look through the contents of a font and copy the characters you want. Click the start or windows button, click All Programs then xxx then yyy. A similar but more powerful program is Babel Map.
For OS 10.1-10.6 (for 10.7 and above see below), Mac's Character Viewer and Keyboard Viewer are your best resources for navigating fonts. If you have a flag in the upper right corner of your screen, click on it and look for the viewers. If neither program is shown as an option, select Open Language and Text... and turn the viewers on. Or if you don't see a flag, open system preferences, choose language & text, then input sources. The Character Viewer is powerful, and many of its best features are found only after use. Try choosing different items in the View dropdown menu. Click some of the buttons that appear just below the View dropdown. Click the triangles beside Character Info and Font Variation. The Character Viewer for OS 10.7 and beyond is of little use in finding glyphs specific to Athena Ruby. You will need to use a third-party application, such as Linotype Fontexplorer or PopChar X. Also see below.
Because the glyphs cover such a wide number of tables, quite separate from each other in the Unicode standard, a generic palette or glyph finder can be awkward to use. Users may find it more useful to use as palettes the character ensemble on the Dumbarton Oaks Athena Ruby website. See here for a Web-based custom palette (caution: some versions of Safari do not support this tool; other major browsers do). Or download the Word, InDesign, PDF, XML, or HTML document, and simply copy the characters you want.
Athena Ruby is a complex font that uses advanced, specialized features in OpenType. The advanced features are too advanced, in fact, for the software most commonly used in 2012, when the font was released. See here for a list of commonly used programs, and their compatibility with Athena Ruby.
There are roughly three ways to write documents using Athena Ruby:
Each of these techniques are described below, beginning with the method most familiar (but least ideal), and concluding with least familiar (but most ideal).
The most common word processors—Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Google documents—are popular because they are powerful and easy to use. But the software companies that maintain these programs are selective in the typographic features they support. The advanced OpenType features used by Athena Ruby are usually poorly supported, if at all. Although these programs are not ideal for advanced typography, Athena Ruby has been designed to work with them. Variant letterforms and discretionary ligatures are accessed not through their proper Unicode points but through the Private Use Area (PUA). If you are using character finders and palettes (see above), you will find variant forms and ligatures after all the major alphabets, from U+E100 onward. This method is not ideal because the variant characters are bound to Unicode points that have no meaning, and so the text cannot be reliably searched, sorted, or indexed. To make PUA Athena Ruby text Unicode compliant, it must be converted and exported to an environment that can handle advanced typographic features.
This use of Athena Ruby is ideal for pdfs, personal word processing documents, and publications that do not require much professionalism or interoperability.
Less commonly used but more appropriate for professional publication are a small group of software programs that take advantage of OpenType features. These programs are specialized and require skill to use competently.
InDesign (Adobe), widely used by publishers, can take advantage of many of Athena Ruby's features. See here for an example file.
Unicode text preservation results may vary. Text should remain Unicode compliant from start to end, although in some cases software may embed raw glyph IDs and not the underlying Unicode points. One needs to turn on discretionary ligatures and stylistic variants for the advanced OpenType features to work. InDesign version 5.5 exhibits unusual behavior regarding complex decorations. In traversing a series of complex decorations, the cursor may erratically jump. It is unclear what creates this effect. Experiments with the same string in other programs do not produce the same results.
TEX is a sophisticated typesetting system that uses text markup to take advantage of advanced typography. Special versions of TeX, notably XeTeX, are also equipped to access ligatures and variant letterforms in compliance with Unicode standards.
Method B is ideal for generating more professional-looking pdfs than those generated under Method C, since the software programs provide subtle but important typographic finesse. There is also a greater chance that underlying Unicode data will be preserved.
The preferred method for getting the most out of Athena Ruby involves a digital publishing workflow. The stages of that workflow, very broadly, include the following four interrelated steps:
These four steps are usually negotiated concurrently, as an author or a team discovers the method that works best for them and their audience. Because the four steps require different skills and expertise, this method usually requires collaboration and teamwork.
Users of this method will want to pay attention to the draft of CSS Fonts Module Level 3, which is the incipient standard for how to access and use advanced OpenType features on the Internet.
This method will be deployed most often in HTML-based projects, which are browser-dependent. But not all browsers are created equal. At the present, Firefox (PC or Mac) and Chrome (Mac particularly) best support Athena Ruby's advanced features. The best way to compare behavior is to open the database in different browsers.
The use of Athena Ruby on web-based projects requires some customized work with CSS, to accommodate the needs of different browsers. A block of CSS code using Athena Ruby might look like this:
@font-face{
font-family:athenaruby;
src:url('../fonts/athenaruby_b018-webfont.eot?#iefix')
format('embedded-opentype'),
url('../fonts/athenaruby_b018-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
url('../fonts/AthenaRuby_b018.ttf') format('truetype'),
url('../fonts/athenaruby_b018-webfont.svg#athenaruby')
format('svg');
}
.athenaruby{
font-family:athenaruby;
}
Study some of the example projects to get a sense of how to develop CSS that works best for your project.
|
Method A |
Method B |
Method C |
|
| Who should use | Anyone publishing inscriptions with XML or a similar markup language. Especially suitable for collaborative Web-based projects (e.g., EpiDoc, SigiDoc) | Publishers and those with specialized software that supports direct input of individual glyphs (e.g., InDesign) | Anyone who needs to display a particular variant in software that does not provide access to OpenType Layout or direct glyph input |
| How to use advanced features | Mark variants, ligatures, and symbols with tags (e.g., XML); set up stylesheets (e.g., CSS) to render the code correctly. | Choose variant letters, ligatures, and other glyphs with built-in advanced glyph palette | Use word processor or character map software (e.g., CharMap on the PC, Character Palette on the Mac) to select variants in the PUA codeplane |
| Ideal publishing venues | Print and digital (PDF and web-based) | Print and digital (PDF only) | Print and digital (PDF only) |
| Advantages | Text remains Unicode compliant from start to end. Does not rely upon specialized software for document creation. CSS standards may be used, so readers need not have the font installed | One can see precisely which variant or ligature is being used. Text should remain Unicode compliant from start to end, although in some cases software may embed raw glyph IDs. | Can be used in many commonly used programs (e.g., Word, OpenOffice, Excel). One can see precisely which variant or ligature is being used. |
| Disadvantages | Cumbersome to see variants as you type. Training in XML can be daunting, and few use it (so far). CSS syntax for advanced layout features not yet finalized and is only just beginning to be supported in browsers. | Limited to relatively expensive, professional page layout software. Unicode text preservation results may vary. | This method uses the PUA, which is not recommended because it is idiosyncratic and font-dependent. Text is not Unicode compliant, so cannot be reliably searched, sorted or indexed (to make it Unicode compliant the text must be converted). |
The glyphs in Athena Ruby were designed with two guiding principles. The first was to preserve our publishing legacy. The custom typography in Dumbarton Oaks books evolved over time, and glyphs were created for specific catalogues or monographs. Nicholas Oikonomides pioneered the categorization and dating of letterforms in Byzantine seals, epitomized by his A Collection of Dated Byzantine Lead Seals (Washington, D.C., 1986), which featured the world's first font for Byzantine inscriptions. This led to a number of other fonts developed specially in the 1990s for publications about seals, coins, and silver plate. We wished to consolidate and preserve that legacy, so Athena Ruby's design conserves much of the aesthetic from Athena and older fonts.
The second principle was to foster a scholarly conversation about Byzantine letterforms. We conservatively anticipated variants, ligatures, and designs that had not been included in our older fonts, but seemed especially useful, and noncontroversial, to distinguish as new types. Our focus was on seals, coins, weights. Some media, such as brick stamps, bread stamps, and frescoes, were also consulted, but not as extensively.
The glyphs in Athena Ruby are meant to evoke, but not replicate, types of letters. Authors who need to replicate exact letterforms not found in Athena Ruby should either augment the font on their own, or work with customized drawings and photographs.
How did you assign characters to the Private Use Area (PUA)? Why doesn't your arrangement coincide with those found in other epigraphic fonts?
Other custom fonts with glyphs useful in Byzantine epigraphy, such as Cardo, IFAOGrec
Unicode, Junicode, and New Athena
Unicode, also use the PUA. Each font was built with a different rationale for
the selection and arrangement of the glyphs in the PUA. That is entirely appropriate, if
not expected, since the PUA is meant for private use, and therefore must involve
arbitrary decisions. We decided early on that we could not align the characters needed
in Athena Ruby with the rationale used by other epigraphic fonts for the PUA.
Most PUA codepoints in Athena Ruby are concessions. In an ideal world, the
R-shaped beta, very common in Byzantine seals, would be accessed by keying in U+0392
then accessing variant 1. But because most software programs do not allow a user to
choose variant letterforms, we provided a copy of the glyph at U+E11B. This concessive
use of the PUA applies to the first three subblocks (U+E100.., U+E300.., U+E400..).
Subsequent blocks (U+E500.., U+E600.., U+E700..) have no corresponding Unicode point,
and may never have one. Many of these proprietary codepoints are used in different ways
in different disciplines, and there is no guarantee that the meanings imputed by users
of Athena Ruby would hold true in other proprietary fonts. So assignments to the PUA
have been made with attention only to users of Athena Ruby, to avoid giving the
impression that it is commensurate with other fonts.
Nevertheless, some of
the overlap between Athena Ruby and other epigraphic fonts points to agreement on types
of letterforms in the Byzantine period. Discussion about this topic is ideal for the Athena Ruby
Google group.
How do you use the overbar in conjunction with ligatures?
If you're using the private use area, use U+0305 immediately after the glyph. If you're using Unicode-based ligatures, use U+0305 after each ligature letter that takes an overbar.
Why don't you include other Greek Unicode characters such as the digamma, the sho, and the san?
The font covers the Byzantine period, so characters that went out of use before the foundation of Constantinople (324) were not included.
I don't see a special character that I need. Could you create a new version of the font with these new forms?
Dumbarton Oaks will add to the official version of the font only as our publishing needs grow, and even then only as scholars develop a consensus about letterform types. But this should not keep you from developing your own special glyphs, either as an extension to Athena Ruby or as a new font altogether. Under the Creative Commons License users are required to share any modified forms of Athena Ruby. We hope the font encourages deeper study, conversation, and discoveries in the typology of Byzantine letterforms. But that task belongs to the scholarly community.
I already have a document that uses the previous Athena font. Is there a conversion tool I can use?
Here is a web-based conversion tool, under development.
Your database of letterforms is incomplete and incorrect. How do I supply corrections?
Join the Athena Ruby discussion list and pose the correction. Should participants react favorably to the suggestions, the errors will be corrected. Proposed new characters will be held in reserve until our publication needs justify the expense of introducing professionally drawn characters.
I'm setting up a web-based project, but the font isn't showing. What is wrong?
Common problems include the following:
.eot application/octet-stream
.otf application/x-font-otf
.svg image/svg+xml
.woff application/font-woff
<meta
http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> I'm using Athena Ruby in an online project. I'm trying to get a variation of a ligature. I can get discretionary ligatures to appear, but I can't get the variant to show up. What am I doing wrong?
This problem frequently happens when you try to invoke the discretionary ligature and the variation on two separate lines of CSS code. For example (using character variant 49, alpha and beta):
font-feature-settings:"liga" on, "dlig"
on;
font-feature-settings: 'cv49' 1;
font-feature-settings:"liga" on, "dlig" on, "cv49" on;
Why doesn't Athena Ruby support the full set of ASCII characters?
Font designers for Windows XP and earlier operating systems generally regarded it as a best practice to include in each font at least one complete Windows 8-bit codepage for backward compatibility. Since Athena Ruby relies on font and layout technologies that are not found on older systems, backward compatibility seemed irrelevant. Including a full codepage would have added considerably to the cost of the font's development, without serving any of its main functions.
Designers: Tiro Typeworks
Project manager: Joel Kalvesmaki
Consultants: Eric McGeer, Cécile Morrisson, Werner Seibt,