Script greek style incongruous with serifed roman glyphs

[katef]

For Crimson-Roman, the greek glyphs are drawn with a rounded, handwritten script style. These look lovely, of course, but don't go with the style for the rest of the font. I presume this is an intentional design decision, since I can't find any alternate greek glyphs in the source. What's the rationale for these?

Here for example, I would expect the capital lambda to have the same style as the capital A.

My suggestion is to have the greek glyphs in serifed style by default, and to move the existing glyphs to stylistic alternates instead.

I realise that drawing new glyphs is quite a lot of work. TeX Gyre's Pagella has quite similar greek glyphs; perhaps some could be borrowed from there, and tweaked to fit the same proportions as for Crimson's existing script-style glyphs.

[skosch]

Yeah, that was a deliberate (if difficult) decision. I figured I'd design the Greek to be a real text face, math looks be damned. I've always thought latinized, chiselled-style Greek to look somehow wrong at least in text. I particularly liked what Slimbach did in his Garamond Premier Pro but wanted the uppercase ductus to match the lowercase. I did do quite a bit of research and experimentation before settling on this (see e.g. CatharsisFonts/Cormorant#6).

Aware that it'd clash with the Roman, I believed that at some point I'd create a Real Math Font, including a Greek with a Latin look, at U+1D6A8 ... except I never got around to it.

In the meantime, you could absolutely mix & match fonts, though. Have you checked out the Greek Font Society yet?

[katef]

@skosch Okay - Would you be okay with adding stylistic alternates for chiselled style greek? Then I could specify the opentype feature for that, and I'd be a happy bunny.

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about anything specifically for maths, here.

[skosch]

Oh I would be totally okay, and I appreciate the offer, I just don't have the time these days.

[katef]

Great! Do you know where they should live? Somewhere in the private use area?

[skosch]

I think so? Although come to think of it, why not put it in the math section? Isn't that just the point?

[katef]

I don't think this should go in the math section because it's not specific to mathematical use. E.g. I wouldn't want to use mathematical codepoints to write somebody's name.

Although perhaps the math section could be populated with references to these new glyphs.

[skosch]

Well, I'll leave it up to you then. References in the math section would make sense.

I'd prefer to leave the current Greek untouched – unless you want to create six weights of Latinesque Greek, then we could talk about switching out the current calligraphic glyphs as alternates.

[katef]

Yes, I'm not signing up for that just yet :) I'm only intending to work on Roman for the moment, and probably just uppercase at first. Of course I agree about leaving the current glyphs where they are.