Under the influence of the neoclassical ideals of the late 18th century, the famous French typecutter Firmin Didot in Paris designed a new Greek typeface (1805) which was immediately used in the publishing programme of Adamantios Korai, the prominent intellectual figure of the Greek diaspora and leading scholar of the Greek Enlightenment. The typeface eventually arrived in Greece, with the field press which came with Didot’s grandson Ambroise Firmin Didot, during the Greek Revolution in 1821. Since then the typeface has enjoyed an unrivaled success as the type of choice for almost every kind of publication until the last decades of the 20th century.

Didot’s type was the base for a new font, GFS Didot (1994) which was designed by Takis Katsoulidis, and digitised by George Matthiopoulos. The typeface is accompanied by a matching latin alphabet based on Hermann Zapf’s Palatino.

Didot's original type design, as is documented in publications during the first decades of the 19th century, was digitized and revived by George D. Matthiopoulos in 2006 for a project of the Department of Literature in the School of Philosophy at the University of Thessaloniki, and is now available for general use.

Giambattista Bodoni was the most prolific Italian typecutter of the 18th century. While he worked in the Vatican Press he was involved in the typecutting of “exotic” languages for which catholic literature was printed. When he established his own press in Parma he did published many books of the classics with his own Greek typefaces. He was among the first European typecutters to move away from the byzantine cursive tradition with the numerous ligatures which was the norm until then. His Greek types influenced many subsequent designers, yet they fell in disuse by the middle of the 19th century.
Bodoni’s Greek types were the base for the first experimental font by Greek Font Society, GFS Bodoni (1992-1993), which was designed by Takis Katsoulidis, and digitised by George Matthiopoulos. The typeface is accompanied by a matching latin alphabet.

GFS presented Bodoni's original Greek typeface in the commemorative edition of Pindar's Olympian Odes (2004), in digital version by George D. Matthiopoulos, and is now available as free ware for the general public. In the OpenType features, under ligatures, one may alternately use diphthongs with the accents placed in between the characters, as Giambattista Bodoni did when setting greek texts.

In Greece the terms italic and oblique have the same meaning since they are borrowed from the latin typographic practice without any real historical equivalent in Greek history. Until the end of the 19th century Greek typefaces were cut and cast indepedently, not as members of a typefamily. The mechanisation of typecutting allowed the transformation of upright Greek typefaces to oblique designs. Nonetheless, the typesetting practice of a cursive Greek font to complement an upright one did not survive the 19th century. The experimental font GFS Olga (1995) attempts to revive this lost tradition. The typeface was designed and digitised by George Matthiopoulos, based on the historical Porson Greek type (1803) with the intention to be the companion of the upright GFS Didot font whenever there is a need for an italic alternative.

The design of new Greek typefaces always followed the growing needs of the Classical Studies in the major European Universities. Furthermore, by the end of the 19th century bibliology had become an established section of Historical Studies, and, as John Bowman commented, the prevailing attitude was that Greek types should adhere to a lost idealized, yet undefined, greekness of yore. Especially in Great Britain this tendency remained unchallenged in the first decades of the 20th century, both by Richard Proctor, curator of the incunabula section in the British Museum Library and his successor Victor Scholderer. In 1927, Scholderer, on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Greek Studies, got involved in choosing and consulting the design and production of a Greek type called New Hellenic cut by the Lanston Monotype Corporation. He chose the revival of a round, and almost monoline type which had first appeared in 1492 in the edition of Macrobius, ascribable to the printing shop of Giovanni Rosso (Joannes Rubeus) in Venice. New Hellenic was the only successful typeface in Great Britain after the introduction of Porson Greek well over a century before. The type, since to 1930’s, was also well received in Greece, albeit with a different design for Ksi and Omega.
GFS digitized the typeface (1993-1994) funded by the Athens Archeological Society with the addition of a new set of epigraphical symbols. Later (2000) more weights were added (italic, bold and bold italic) as well as a latin version.

In England, during the 1790’s, Cambridge University Press decided to procure a new set of Greek types. The university’s great scholar of Classics, Richard Porson was asked to produce a typeface based on his handsome handwriting and Richard Austin was commissioned to cut the types. The type was completed in 1808, after the untimely death of Porson the previous year. Its success was immediate and since then the classical editions in Great Britain and the U.S.A. use it, almost invariably. In 1913, Monotype released the typeface with some corrections, notably replacing the upright capitals suggested by Porson with inclined ones. In Greece the typeface was used under the name Pelasgika type. GFS Porson is based on the Monotype version, though using upright capitals, as in the original.

Elpis has been designed in order to be functional even at poor printing conditions. Baring this in mind, Elpis is a robust typeface with a rather tight and clean design so as to be suitable even for inferior paper or low resolution printing. With short ascenders and descenders thus increasing counter size, rounded, sturdy serifs and a humanistic axis, slight antithesis between thick and thin strokes, and its horizontality, Elpis incorporates rhythm and smoothness. The typeface is also accompanied by a set of non-lining figures and supports open type features such as ligatures, small capitals, old style figures, tabular figures and case-sensitive forms.
Elpis Greek, attempts a modern representation of the greek script while respecting its long latin independent tradition. The greek has been designed to blend optically with the latin avoiding at the same time the ‘latinisation’ of its letterforms. Elpis was designed with an effort to create an overall matching texture to the latin forms, for example in terms of colour (stroke analogy, character width and height) and shape (resemblance of curvature and terminals, where that could be applied) the basic challenge being the combination of the latin script that is prevailed by horizontal and vertical forms as opposed to the greek that has mostly rounded forms. The letters maintain the fluidity of the script, each letter discreetly passing on to the next one, while balancing the variety of stress encountered in greek letterforms. Elpis is an original design by Natasha Raissaki released by GFS as part of the ongoing effort to contribute to contemporary typography.

The type family GFS Artemisia was designed by the painter-engraver Takis Katsoulidis and reflects his style and typographic acumen. It is largely his effort to offer, from a different perspective, a type face which, like Times Greek, would be applicable to a wide spectrum of uses and equally agreeable and legible. The typeface has been digitised by George D. Matthiopoulos.

Yannis Kefallinos (1894–1958) was one of the most innovative engravers of his generation and the first who researched methodicaly the aesthetics of book and typographic design in Greece. He taught at the Fine Arts School of Athens and established the first book design workshop from which many practising artists of the 60's and 70's had graduated. In the late 50's Kefallinos designed and published an exquisite book with engraved illustrations of the ancient white funerary pottery in Attica in collaboration with Varlamos, Montesanto, Damianakis. For the text of Kefallinos' Δέκα λευκαί λήκυθοι (1956) the artist used a typeface which he himself had designed a few years before for an unrealised edition of Theocritos' Idyls. Its complex and heavily decorative design does point to aesthetic codes which preoccupied his artistic expression and, although impractical for contemporary text setting, it remains an original display face, or it can be used as initials.
The book design workshop of the Fine Arts School of Athens has been recently reorganised, under the direction of professor Leoni Vidali, and with her collaboration George D. Matthiopoulos has redesigned digitaly this historical font which is now available as GFS Theokritos.

The ancient Greek alphabet evolved during the millenium of the Byzantine era from majuscule to minuscule form and gradually incorporated a wide array of ligatures, flourishes and other decorative nuances which defined its extrvaant cursive character. Until the late 15th century, typographers who had to deal with Greek text avoided emulating this complicated hand; instead they would use only the twenty four letters of the alphabet separately, often without accents and other diacritics. A celebrated example is the type cut and cast for the typesetting of the New Testament in the so-called Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1512), edited by the Greek scholar, Demetrios Doukas. The type was cut by Arnaldo Guillén de Brocar and the whole edition was a commision by cardinal Francisco Ximénez, in the University of Alcalá (Complutum), Spain. It is one of the best and most representative models of this early tradition in Greek typography which was revived in the early 20th century by the eminent bibliographer of the British Library, Richard Proctor. A font named Otter Greek was cut in 1903 and a book was printed using the new type. The original type had no capitals so Proctor added his own, which were rather large and ill-fitted. The early death of Proctor, the big size of the font and the different aesthetic notions of the time were the reasons that Otter Greek was destined to oblivion, as a curiosity. Greek Font Society incorporated Brocar's famous and distinctive type in the commemorative edition of Pindar's Odes for the Athens Olympics (2004) and the type with a new set of capitals, revived digitaly by George D. Matthiopoulos, is now available for general use.