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.
