Good slab font with Polytonic Greek support to go with Caecilia

Question

I am typesetting a book in a combination of PMN Caecilia (body text) and FF Clan (headings and other minor things).

In this book appears exactly one work in Greek: μαῖα. It appears in a footnote (which are set in Caecilia). Unfortunately, Caecilia—or at least the version of it that I have—does not support Greek, so I need to set the word in a different font. Having trawled through every single font I have on my machine, however, I have come to the conclusion that I have absolutely no slab fonts anything like Caecilia that support Polytonic Greek.

Uncle Google has led me to find DejaVu Serif, which I suppose is at least relatively close, especially in a different alphabet. But it’s not really good.

I should be most grateful if anyone here knows of any good fonts that:

— look good
— are slab/similar to Caecilia
— have Polytonic Greek support
— is free (if possible—I doubt the company will let me buy a commercial font just for one word)

Answer 1

MyFonts offer PF Centro Slab Pro

There are a number of fonts which have both μ and α, but that's the only one with ῖ as well. Even if you don't like the other characters, you might find that the Greek is a reasonable match for PMN Caecilia:

Answer 2

Did you see this page? http://www.russellcottrell.com/greek/fonts.asp

It had a few interesting options. I looked at Hindsight Unicode by Darren Rigby, it's not bad in a pinch. But I'm sure there's better…

Answer 3

If you can't find a match (and I don't know of anything in the OSF/CC/Free category that's close -- DejaVu has a completely different architecture from Caecilia), the old design standby is to use a contrasting face that is clearly intended to convey "This here word is foreign. Get used to it."

On that basis, an Italic would work well. You would want to match x-heights, possibly by adjusting the point size, but most readers would identify it as a device to indicate a foreign word. This is a great deal more satisfactory than using something that will look like a mistake, which is what a not-quite-matching slab serif will give you.