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Displaying Metrical Symbols in Perseus
25 March 2002
Commentaries on Greek and Latin verse texts frequently discuss the meter of the poetry. Until now, Perseus has not had a good way to display the standard symbols for long and short syllables, resolutions, responsion, and the various other metrical features these notes talk about.
Now we can display metrical symbols, using an extension of the mechanism we use for the Greek alphabet. We have devised a simple representation or "transliteration" of the metrical symbols, which will work correctly on any computer and browser. You will see metrical analyses in this form until you ask for display of metrical symbols.
Use the Configure Display tool to set up the display of metrical symbols. Go to the "Meter Display" section at the very end of the list of display options. Choose either "transliteration," for the simple, platform-independent representation, or "show as symbols," to see metrical symbols displayed in their usual forms.
If you use Perseus on a Unicode-based system, you do not need a special font for metrical symbols. Most of the symbols we use are already in the Unicode character set.
If you are not using Unicode, you may install the meter font Anaxiphorminx, developed by Dr. I. L. Pfeijfer of the University of Leiden. Anaxiphorminx is available from the CL Fonts Project of the Classical Association of the Empire State. The font was originally created for the Macintosh, but there is a True Type version as well, suitable for Windows or Unix systems.
This diagram shows the Perseus meter transliteration. 
See the help page for meter encoding for more details.
You can see examples of metrical analyses in the following Perseus texts:
- E. T. Merrill's commentary on Catullus, introduction (Latin text)
- R. C. Jebb's commentary on Oedipus at Colonus, line 716 (Greek text)
As time goes on, we will update the metrical analyses in other texts to use the new encoding. In some cases, metrical discussion was omitted (because we had no way to encode or display it), but can now be returned to the texts.
Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.