New Athena Unicode Font Download

About New Athena Unicode Font

New Athena Unicode is a freeware multilingual font distributed by the American Philological Association. It follows the latest version of the Unicode standard and includes characters for English and Western European languages, polytonic Greek, Coptic, Old Italic, and Demotic Egyptian transliteration, as well as metrical symbols and other characters used by classical scholars.

LICENSE: The TrueType version of Athenian font and the TrueType version of New Athena Unicode font are made available to all as freeware to facilitate communication on the internet. They may be used in digital or print publication without further permission from the APA. They may not be altered or redistributed without permission. (You may download a full version of the licenses for GreekKeys inputs and fonts.)

Latest Version

new label May 10, 2008: Version 3.3 of New Athena Unicode font (newathu.ttf, dated April 20, 2008) has been released. Version 3.3 contains a few corrected glyphs, but the most important change is the addition of precomposed glyphs for dotted letters for Greek and Coptic papyrology, with the corresponding OpenType ligature definitions. For a text-document showing the list of the codepoints and glyph names in the font, excluding the precomposed glyphs for dotted letters (this is an edited extract of a Unicode cmap table in the font), click here (same file as provided for 3.2). It can be opened with your browser and searched, or downloaded and searched with a word processor or text editor.

DOWNLOAD New Athena Unicode version 3.3 in ttf format (for Windows or Mac OS X or Linux).

Previous Versions: correction and revision history

February 9, 2008: Version 3.2 of New Athena Unicode font (newathu.ttf, dated January 12, 2008) is being released simultaneously with the release of GreekKeys 2008. Version 3.2 contains only one corrected glyph (for a mistake in consistency of size), but the most important change is the the omission of the AAT ligature definitions, so that now the ligature work only in applications that can read OpenType ligature definitions. The OpenType definitions work, whereas there are bugs in the implementation of the AAT definitions. For a text-document showing the complete list of the codepoints and glyph names in the font (an edited extract of a Unicode cmap table in the font), click here. It can be opened with your browser and searched, or downloaded and searched with a word processor or text editor.

December 27, 2007: Version 3.1 of New Athena Unicode font (newathu.ttf, dated December 27, 2007) incorporates a few additional characters. In addition, the OpenType ligature tables have been revised slightly in preparation for the release of GreekKeys 2008 in a few months. For details, see the Revision History in the About document included in the download.

June 26, 2007: Version 3 of New Athena Unicode font (newathu.ttf, dated June 3, 2007) incorporates a few additional characters and the Old Italic block (Etruscan), and some characters have been redrawn for greater consistency. In addition, the OpenType ligature tables have been duplicated and revised to provide compatibility with applications that expect slightly different settings. For details, see the Revision History in the About document included in the download.

August 20/August 7, 2006: Version 2.86 of New Athena Unicode, dated August 20, 2006, replaces version 2.8 (July 24, 2006) or 2.85 (August 10, 2006), with a few additional glyphs added to reflect Unicode 5.0 and six epigraphic characters recently approved for a future version. Version 2.86 adds two Private Use Areas for Coptic papyrology, precomposed coptic iota and upsilon with diaeresis at U+EC4F and U+EC50. Otherwise, versions 2.8 and 2.85 contain a few corrections over 2.7 and for the first time OpenType ligature features that allow the inputting of decomposed Unicode Greek in OpenType-savvy applications (like Mellel and InDesign CS2). The font will work the same as before with GreekKeys Unicode input (which inputs precomposed codepoints and PUA codepoints). With this version, the separate provision of a dfont format font is discontinued, since the ttf format works exactly the same. If you install this version, please be sure you first uninstall New Athena Unicode.dfont, if that is the version you have been using. Anyone who wishes to experiment with decomposed Unicode input may contact me to obtain the testing version of GKUdecomposed input (for US keyboards only).

March 24, 2006: Version 2.7 of New Athena Unicode, dated March 22 (or 24 for dfont format), 2006, contains additional combining diacritics and one new PUA character for a precomposed glyph used rarely in Coptic texts. Other minor corrections have been made in processing the font for the first time with FontLab Studio 5. A Coptic Unicode input for Mac OS X will be made available shortly. The download includes a document with the correction history of the font.

October 1, 2005: Version 2.6 of New Athena Unicode, dated September 30, 2005, contains the addition of a few characters to complete the sets needed for Coptic and for Demotic Egyptian transliteration. The glyphs for the endash and emdash have also been modified (made thicker). This version coincides with a slight revision of the OS X input for Demotic Egyptian.

July 19, 2005: Version 2.5 of New Athena Unicode, dated July 19, 2005, contains a few corrections and the addition of a few new characters, principally to meet the needs of Roman transliteration of Demotic Egyptian in a Unicode-based font (more information and an input for Demotic Egyptian are available). Some of the corrections include resizing of Greek lowercase characters that had somehow become out of proportion to the rest of the set during the repeated process of regenerating the font over the past few years. Therefore, this download is recommended for all users. The download includes a document with further information.

June 7, 2005: Version 2.4 of New Athena Unicode, dated June 6, 2005, contains a few corrections and the addition of many new characters: (1) the new Coptic block of Unicode 4.1 has been added, and the Coptic characters in the old Greek and Coptic block are also present; (2) the inventory of the font's characters has been compared to the May 27, 2005, version of the TLG's quickbeta.pdf and almost all official codepoints that have TLG betacode equivalents are now included in the the font (the exception is astrological symbols).

April 17, 2005: Version 2.3 of New Athena Unicode, dated April 17, 2005, corrects the vertical placement of the upper half brackets (U+2308, U+2309) and provides a wider overscore character (U+0305) for papyrological use (adjacent letters sharing an overstroke should usually now appear with the overstrokes joined into one line). This upgrade is recommended for those with papyrological interests.

March 1, 2005: Version 2.2 of the font New Athena Unicode, dated March 1, 2005, (for the dfont format) or February 27, 2005 (for the ttf format) corrects (it is hoped) a problem with character spacing in Windows applications. Refinements have also been made to character spacing, and all Greek vowels of the same class should now be of the same vertical size and (unless diacritics prevent it) of the same width. The g with cedilla character (U+0123) has been corrected. This download is optional for Macintosh users, but recommended for Windows users.

Jan. 16, 2005: Version 2.1 of the font New Athena Unicode dated Jan. 15, 2005, is now available for download. The sole change from v. 2.0 is the correction of the four dot punctuation U+2058 (formerly a square of four dots, now a diamond pattern; the documentation available earlier did not yet reveal this detail.).

Sept. 27, 2004: Version 2 of the font New Athena Unicode, dated September 26, 2004, was released. This version features various minor improvements and has hundreds of additional characters: all the symbols previously available in the non-standard-encoded SymbolAthenian font are now present with Unicode codepoints, as are many other symbols recently accepted into the Unicode standard (based largely on proposals made by TLG). Further documentation of the font is available in the GreekKeys 2005 release.