The Greek script is used by several communities of people throughout the world, and in different contexts: Greek language, mathematics, phonetics, African languages. Unicode allows encoding of data in all of these contexts, but when it comes to typesetting and typography, these can vary a lot, depending on the context.

In this paper we attempt to give an exhaustive description of issues involved in the typography of Greek script, in all contexts. Besides information on font design and styles, diacritics, punctuation and alternate characters, we also give examples of the most important Greek typefaces and their use. In particular, we show that it is poor typography to use the same typeface for mathematics and Greek text, although these uses of Greek script are identified on the Unicode level.

This information can be useful for Unicode implementors, developers of applications for printing data encoded in Unicode, as well as Unicode users wishing to have a deeper insight in the use of Greek script. We also describe an implementation of the typographical principles listed in this paper, through the Omega typesetting system.

We conclude by giving a list of Greek characters missing from the Unicode encoding which we would like to propose for insertion, and showing examples of their uses.