Diacritic Stacking in Skolar PE Fixed

Back in Polytonic Greek Unicode Still Isn’t Perfect and An Updated Solution to Polytonic Greek Unicode’s Problems I talked about problems with stacking vowel length and other diacritics. At least in terms of the font used on this site, the problems are now solved.

After discussions on the Unicode mailing list, it was clear that the solution to better handling of complex diacritic stacking in polytonic Greek was NOT more precomposed forms but better support in fonts, etc. So I reached out to David Březina, the creator of the Skolar typeface, used on this site, to see if the issues could be addressed.

I’m delighted to say that Březina’s foundry Rosetta Type has released new versions of Skolar PE that address all the issues I had.

I’ve now switched over this site to use the new version, which does mean those old posts complaining about the issues will read a little funny as they won’t actually show examples of the problems they purport to.

Thank you, David, for listening to my input and making my favourite Greek typeface even better!

UPDATE (2017-01-06): turns out I also needed to add font-feature-settings: "ccmp"; for it to work on Safari.

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.