Visigothic minuscule

[honest.bern]

Visigothic minuscule is my first published font.

I used a photo in a book, so the resolution was low and the screening has obscured the outlines. However, this is the first visigothic font that I know of. When I can get hold of a better original, I will issue an update.

The visigothic script was a minuscule used in Spain from the seventh to the twelfth century to write Latin in the Latin alphabet. It is quite different from the Gothic alphabet, which is an uncial script, used in the fourth century in central Europe to write the Gothic language.

I attach “Visigothic1.0.PDF” and “Visigothic.ttf”

Alan Bernard Hughes

[William]

Very nice.

When I can get hold of a better original, I will issue an update.

You might perhaps find the following thread interesting reading. Although the thread is a request in the FontCreator - Requests and Enhancements section of the forum, that request is to automate something that can be done manually now, namely enlarging the scanned image before importing it into FontCreator. That enlarging seems to give the FontCreator software something more to process and results can sometimes improve, even though the same underlying image information is being used.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2276

On a different aspect, you might like to know of the work of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative. I do not know if that is relevant to what you are trying to do, yet as it might be the same historical period I thought that I would mention it so that you can have a look if you choose to do so.

http://www.mufi.info/

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

6 December 2010

[honest.bern]

Thanks for your suggestions. I do not think enlarging the originals would have helped in this case, as the images were a reasonable size but contained serious distortions. However, I am enlarging the images before importing them for my current project (the 42-line bible).

The MUFI site has been helpful, as it has given me standard codes for a number of glyphs. In fact, MUFI only recommends a fairly small number of new codes. MUFI also links to MUFI-compliant fonts, but these are modern fonts rather than reproductions of historic scripts.

Alan Bernard Hughes

[William]

As you are using a Gutenberg original, you might like the following.

http://www.waldenfont.com/

In the lower left corner is a link labelled Fraktur. It leads to a collection of fonts, most of which are Fraktur style. There is a (non-Fraktur) font based on Gutenberg's font.

http://www.waldenfont.com/product.asp?productID=2

If one then returns to the http://www.waldenfont.com/ page and then clicks on the word Downloads on the on-page Menu Bar, one arrives at the following page.

http://www.waldenfont.com/content.asp?contentpageID=9

There are three items related to The Gutenberg Press, a brochure, a manual and a sample font with some characters missing. The mappings for the ligatures and special characters are 8-bit.

However, if you want some Unicode Private Use Area mappings for the ligatures and special characters, I did produce some in 2002.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm

For the avoidance of doubt, however, I mention that the golden ligatures mappings have no official status, you are free to choose whatever Private Use Area mappings you wish for ligatures in your font.

MUFI was produced later than golden ligatures, yet is much more popular. Where both map a ligature, for example, ct, I advise that you use the MUFI mapping, though you are free to include both if you wish, though including both could perhaps lead to confusion for some users of your font so perhaps better not to do so. However, golden ligatures does not cover as many special characters as MUFI, yet the last time I checked, some time ago, MUFI did not have mappings for ligatures such as ppe.

One of my fonts, Chronicle Text, is a blackletter font and includes glyphs for many ligatures.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=679

In particular, the following document.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/t ... atures.pdf

As you may already know, using Private Use Area mappings for ligatures is not the preferred way of including ligatures in a font. The preferred method is to produce an OpenType font with one or more glyph substitution tables. However, using Private Use Area mappings for ligatures can be a good way of getting good hardcopy printouts and producing graphics for the web using software that does not have facilities for handling glyph substitution from an OpenType font.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

28 December 2010

[honest.bern]

I have added OpenType features to my Visigothic font.

“Visigothic revised.pdf” (48.8 kB) explains what I have tried to do.

“Visigothic sample.pdf” (29.5 kB) shows the original text in my font with and without Opentype features enabled

Alan Bernard Hughes