So I needed to find a few nice greek typefaces, get them onto paper on my 600 dpi laser printer, and after a process of adjusting and proofing have the complete work typeset to perfection. Not an easy task with little money. Secondly I wanted to do everything artistic myself, for total control. I thought that time was the only thing I had plenty of, so I went on to find the software I needed.
My typesetting bureau adviced me that the standard for them was Postscript Type 1 fonts, for quality and speed of printing long texts. They explained that all they needed was a PFB file, all the outline information is contained in a singular file, how handy. They also told me, that I most likely would be able to buy the readymade font of high quality from Adobe, but bold, italic, bolditalic, and the corresponding roman typefaces would be really 8 typefaces at an estimated cost of 1200 USD, plus I would need ATM (Adobe type manager) in order to have the font appear on my screen, too. I would have not a huge selection to choose from, though, and yes, it was quite dear, but for high quality one would have to pay.
I also was pointed to people of high DTP credentials and they told me a few different ways, to achieve my goal.
Obviously the easiest was to use the Symbol truetype typeface in windows, but for my greek translator it was a nightmare to find the right keys, and also some essential accents were missing. Special characters were a little problem, greek still has a few. Even though modern greek has abolished all but a few of the many accent combinations the old greek used to have, there are still XXXXXXXexampleXXandXXX. Special characters are a problem in two ways really, there is their physical existance as well as their accessability. I was able to get Corel Draw to produce a PFB, which had the potential to contain everything needed, but more on that later. Soon I knew, that if I wanted every little thing to look perfect and inspired I would have to use a FONTEDITOR. I checked through my extensive list of computer-buff friends and known capable computer stores, and I can say I was really lucky to have them help me in allowing me to test all these programmes, and therefore later make a wise decision as to which Fonteditor I would buy. If it were a perfect product, I thought I even might spend 1000$ on it.
The translation and entering it into the machine was work which had to be on the way soon, so we spend a few afternoons to set up a simple greek system to work without windows, just using DOS and a VGA monitor. My greek translator decided to have one keyboard full of greek characters plus all the standard roman letters all in one. There was obviously a greek keyboard standard, but since he had never used it and the tops of the keys on his keyboard showed the german layout anyway, we thought "lets knit our own". The ASCII characters plus some european characters were left unchanged, and we used FONTMANIA a shareware programme to replace all the IBM drawing characters with the greek ones. Some were the same as roman ones anyway. We used ANSI.sys to remap the keyboard and to give roman characters when pressing ALT+letter, where normal typing was supposed to be in greek. If someone is interested in our highly special system, you can write to us.
Now time was on my side. While the translation was making progress, I could find out about highest quality typesetting. A Helvetica style Postscript font containing both greek and roman script was the goal. Available tools turned out to be Fontographer, Type Designer, Fontmonger and ..... The following report is based on my experience with all of them. The first testphase was to be longer than I thought.