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Text File
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1989-08-05
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8KB
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186 lines
(The splines in these fonts are copyright © 1987,1988 by George Williams)
(anyone may use the fonts, or distribute them, provided this file accompany them)
A Few words of justification…
Adobe advertises their fonts as being perfect for brainwashing people in the
business world. But they have very few that are just fun to have around. These fonts
are mostly impractical, but they are not run of the mill Roman letters. They were
made for my amusement and I hope you can use them for yours.
A discussion of chosing characters…
Being of a somewhat historical bent, I have tried to capture many of the great
medieval and renaissance caligraphic styles. Now this leads to some interesting
problems that do not have to be faced in modern printing…
Many of these fonts have a long-s character (the thing that looks like an f)
which usually resides at Shift-Option-S. If you want to use it, then the standard
practice (at least in Shakespeare’s day) was that the long-s should be used initially
and medially, while the short-s would be used only at the ends of words. There was on
capital long-s. (This, by the way, has resulted in the German es-zet character (the
double-s that looks like a beta), it is actually a ligature between a long- and a
short-s, and should therefore, only be used at the ends of words.)
There was a similar problem with the letters “u”,“v” and “i”, “j”, (again in
Shakespeare’s day) the character “v” was used for either an ‘u’ or a ‘v’ sound as the
initial character in a word, and “u” for either sound internally or at the end of a
word. The character “i” was used for either the ‘i’ or ‘j’ sounds, except in the
combination “ii” which would be written as “ij”, and in roman numerals were the final
“i” of a series would be written as “j”, as in “xiij” (13). As for capital letters,
most fonts of Shakespeare’s time had only one “V” and “I” in Roman letters, and “U”
and “J” in black-letter.
In some fonts there were two forms of the letters “h”, “m” and “n”, one which
looked more like the modern letter, and one where the rightmost veritcal of the letter
extended down below the base-line. The choice between the two often depending on
whether the letter were at the end of a word or not.
Many fonts have various alternate forms of letters (usually to be found residing on
Shift- Option-, or just Option-), there may have been circumstances which governed
their use, but I don’t know what those might be. The rules I have given above, are
what were generally considered good printing practice in 16th century England. (I
think)
A word on punctuation…
Most of these fonts contain the following marks of punctuation: space and
non-breaking space, exclamation point, question mark, period, comma, colon,
semi-colon, all four quotation marks, hyphens, n and m dashes and the parentheses.
Some have ampersands, brackets and braces.
Caveat Utor…
With the exception of Italic and Gothic Hand, the caligraphic fonts are not
perfect—that is the weights of lines do not match perfectly, similar letters are not
always shaped exactly the same way, etc.
Decorative Floral.
This font consists of the alphabetic characters (including most of the accented
lower case characters), the digits, the marks of punctuation commonly used in modern
English printing, and an ampersand. Even on a laser printer the eccentricities of
this font show up best at point sizes above 24.
Formal Script, and Formal Script Bold.
These are script fonts (obviously), with joins at either the baseline or at the
x-height. Normal lower case letters expect to join at the baseline, but by pressing
Shift-Option- it expects an x-height join. Thus the “r” that follows the “o” is
really Shift-Option-r, while the one following the “c” is a normal “r”. These fonts
contain the letters (upper case, lower case and lower case with a join at the
x-height), the digits and some marks of punctuation. There is a long-s at Option-s
and a long-s with a x-height join at Option-z.
Picadilly and Picadilly Bizarre.
Seven letters of this font appear on my bicycle, from them I extrapolated the
rest of the font. I have since seen a few more attached to the name “Picadilly”. The
Bizarre version is a mistake that I happened to like. I must admit that some of the
lower case letters were not bizarre enough and needed an extra line segment added.
These consist of the letters and marks of punctuation.
Italic Hand
This is a computerized version of my itallic hand. It consists of the letters,
the digits, marks of punctuation, an ampersand and many ligatures. This is a rather
like Zapf Chancery except that it is more swash (and therefore needs the ligatures).
SOa => as
SOc => C to be followed by an a or an o
Ot => T to be followed by an a or an o
Os => ß
Oz => double long s
Ol => double f to be followed by an l,k,h,b or f
Of => double f
O/ => fancy e
SO2 => fancy L
SO3 => double t
SO4 => ft
SO5 => fi
SO6 => fl
SO7 => t (to follow c or s (not long-s))
SO9 => t (to be followed by h)
SOe => es
SOt => fancy T
SOy => alternate y
SOi => dotless i
SOs => long s
SOd => d (to be followed by l,k,h,b, f or long-s)
SOf => f (to be followed by l,k,h,b)
SOg => alternate g
SOh => Th
SOj => dotless j
SOl => l (to be followed by l,k,h,b, f or long-s)
SOz => long s (to be followed by l,k,h,b)
SOn => fancy n
SOm => fancy m
Bastarda
A black-letter hand that was used by the first English printers (and so,
presumably by continental ones since the English tended not to make their own type),
Caxton’s version of Chaucer’s Cantabury Tales was printed in this font.
This particular font consists of the letters (including those with accents), a
number of ligatures, digits (not accurate, I’m sure, I guessed here), ampersand, and
marks of punctuation. The ligatures are as follows:
Os => ß
SO' => Æ
O' => æ
SOq => Œ
Oq => œ
SO` => ft
SO1 => ll
SO2 => ff
SO3 => ffi
SO4 => ffl
SO5 => fi
SO6 => fl
SO7 => long-s, long-s
SO9 => long-s, l
SO0 => long-s, p
SOt => st
SOs => long-s
SOh => alternate h (without descender)
SOn => alternate n (with descender)
SOm => alternate m (with descender)
Rotunda
Rotunda is a rounded variant of the standard black-letter character, this
version was used primarily in southern-Europe. This font contains the letters, and
marks of punctuation. There is a long-s at SOs, and alternate version of h,m and n at
SOh,m,n.
Textura, Textura Modern, TexturaStriped and YkcowrebbaJ
This is the quintessential “Gothic” hand. The Modern version follows a more
nearly modern convention as to the size of the Majuscules. YkcowrebbaJ is a mirror
image version. The Striped version has stripes running across the miniscule letters
(I grabbed this idea from an Italian version of Textura). These fonts contain the
letters, and marks of punctuation, an ampersand, with a long-s at SOs.
Gothic Hnd
This is an exaggerated version of my gothic hand, it is designed so that the word
“minimum” is illegable. This contains the letters, and marks of punctuation
(including brackets, braces) and ampersand.
Roman Uncial, Coiled Uncial and Roman Uncial Modern
The uncials were the first hand that had both upper and lower case letters (though
they were called Uncials and half-uncials), this did not seem to be very consistant
and often the two are rather mixed, there was also a wide variety of alternate letter
forms. As with Textura the Modern version contains large upper case letters. The
coiled font is something I made up myself, I doubt anyone would want to use only these
letters, but selecting, say, “t” and making all “t”s in a document from the coiled
font has a rather nice effect. These fonts consist of the letters, digits and marks
of punctuation.
There are alternate characters on: Or Og Ov Oh SOw SOe SOr SOy SOu SOf
SOg SOh SOk SOx SOb SOn SOm
Lombardo-Beneventan
This font consists only of minuscule letters (although I have filled the upper
case letters with duplicates of the lower case) and the marks of punctuation.
Lombardic
This font consists only of majuscule letters (although I have filled the lower
case letters with the upper case, slightly reduced) and marks of punctuation.
One final word…
If you have any comments you can reach me at:
…!uunet!ghsvax!gww
or
George Williams
425 E. Colorado St. #710
Glendale, Ca. 91205
I don’t promise to respond.
George Williams
August 9, 1988