Hello everyone, I'd like to share a new font which has been in the works for a while now. GFS Heraklit, to be released soon by the Greek Font Society, is a digital revival of Hermann Zapf's "Heraklit", which was designed in the 1950s as a Greek font to accompany the Latin Palatino. Although there have been some other Greek Palatinos released since then, none of them are digital versions of the Heraklit design, so this will be the first such digital font to be available. As far as I am aware, Heraklit has previously been released in two formats: manually-set metal type and phototype. We (George Matthiopoulos, Antonis Tsolomitis and myself) have developed this typeface to match contemporary PostScript Palatino (which is used for the Latin part of the font, in the form of an extended version of URW Palladio), and the subtle differences it has from the version of Palatino the original metal Heraklit was designed to accompany. We hope you enjoy.
Being a font from the Greek Font Society, GFS Heraklit, of course, supports polytonic Greek. It also has support for old-style figures and small capitals.
The sample attached does not have the final kerning and letterspacing, but the letterforms are pretty much done.
A release of the regular version is forthcoming (soon!), and two more releases, currently in progress, will expand upon that with a bold/bold "italic"/"italic" version (whether or not the word "italic" can apply to Greek I don't really want to debate right here, but these will be expansions upon, rather than revivals of, Zapf's design), as well as a set of mathematics fonts. But I don't have an exact timeframe for the completion of those parts of the project.
In the meantime, feel free to leave any comments on what we've got to show right now. I'm also interested in hearing your thoughts on any "italic" or mathematical design pointers for this style of typeface, and I will update this thread with some samples of those expansions when they're ready to share. Also, if you have any comments on the letterspacing/necessary kerning (besides the capital letters needing to be kerned with the lowercase, which is already in progress), please let me know what you think (see the attached PDF).