Greta Text

Greta Serif is a contemporary typeface family specifically designed for the demands of newspaper printing, available in three optical sizes (Text, Display and Grande). Greta Text has been designed as a body text typeface for print and online newspapers, and for editorial projects that demand highly functional typography. It has been tested in countless editorial projects, and dozens of languages, and has proved to be a very effective typeface for long continuous text with modern flavour unburdened by traditions. In combination with other Greta versions, it offers a complete palette of typographic choices.

The unique nature of newspaper language requires adjustments to typeface proportions. Acronyms and abbreviations, for example, occur much less frequently in literature than in journalism, so capital letters, which serve mainly to indicate the beginnings of sentences, are typically designed to be rather large and dark. In newspaper articles, where acronyms, abbreviations and proper names are used much more often, the capitals must be smaller and lighter so as not to disrupt the text flow. Numerals also frequently appear in newspaper articles and must be proportioned somewhat differently than usual so that they function as an integral part of the body of text. Greta Text was designed from the outset to respond directly to these special demands of newspaper printing.

Newspaper printing poses special challenges for font designers. Despite newspaper printing having undergone significant improvements, it is still inferior to most book printing and requires letter shapes which are resistant to the distortion that can be caused by high-speed web presses and cheap paper. Greta Serif, with its three optical sizes, is specifically designed to address this issue: the Text cuts are designed for the main text between the sizes of 8 and 11pt, Display cuts are for headlines between 14 and 21pt, and Grande is designed for the largest titles, mastheads and eye-catching graphics.

Each weight of Greta Text includes nine different kinds of numerals. Proportional lining figures come as default figures in Greta Text. It also, however, includes old-style figures, tabular numerals (both lining and old-style), small caps numerals, superior, inferior, circled and circled inverted numerals. For the running text, old-style figures work best; for capital setting, use lining figures; and for small caps, choose the specially designed Small Caps numerals applicable via OpenType layout features. When you take a licence for this font you can choose the default numeral variants inside the fonts.

Greta Text is part of the Typotheque Multiscript font collection, supporting at least nine different writing scripts, and over four billion people worldwide. Typotheque Multiscript are fonts that cover Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Thai.

Each weight of Greta Text comes in three different grades. Grades are similar to weights, except the differences in weight between grades are very subtle and the grades use the same metrics information. When setting text with different font grades, the font widths remain the same, so the text doesn’t reflow. Grades can help in fine-tuning the typographic colour of the text, or they can be useful when combining positive and negative text (light text on dark background), and trying to achieve even typographic ‘colour’ of the text. Because the white reflects more light than dark colours, it is impossible to achieve the same appearance of the text on a light background as on dark ones using the same font weight. The grades are available only as part of the complete package and cannot be purchased separately.