Caution: This email was sent from someone outside of the University of Lethbridge. Do not click on links or open attachments unless you know they are safe. Please forward suspicious emails to phishing@uleth.ca. Hello Peter (if I may),
I’d like to second Lisa Fagin Davis’s thanks for your work on these fonts. #MedievalTwitter is, indeed, losing its collective mind over Joscelyn and not *just* because folks are in various versions of isolation. I too am rhapsodizing about ligatures. There are already many uses for these fonts; there will be more. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But I would just like to add my Huzzah to those of others!
Cheers, [signature_1461926666] BA (ANU) MA PhD (Melb) Grad.Dip.Mod.Lang. (UWA) Senior Honorary Research Fellow University of Western Australia From: "Baker, Peter S (psb6m)" psb6m@virginia.edu Date: Thursday, 2 April 2020 at 4:12 am To: "dm-l@uleth.ca" dm-l@uleth.ca, "medtextl@lists.illinois.edu" medtextl@lists.illinois.edu Subject: [dm-l] Medieval font dump
Caution: This email was sent from someone outside of the University of Lethbridge. Do not click on links or open attachments unless you know they are safe. Please forward suspicious emails to phishing@uleth.ca. I've decided to do this all at once rather than annoying people by posting about them one by one. The story overall is that I have a number of font projects, some going back nearly thirty years, and I have decided to make public repositories for any that are in a usable state. Why? Because I am a senior citizen, and life seems uncertain right now. I want them out in public, with source code, so that people can download and enjoy them, fork them if they want, and develop them farther. A couple of these have been out in the wild for some time, but the repository is where you will find the latest version.
I haven't made releases for these, but each repository has a "font" folder. To get the font, click on that folder, then click on the name of the file, then find and click the "Download" button.
Here are the fonts:
BeowulfOT
This is an update of my Beowulf1 font, which has been out and about just about forever, and which you see in lots of places from websites to book covers to TV titles. This version, never before released, has a modern mode (legible to modern readers) and a historical mode (for teachers and purists). Unlike the original version, it has ligatures and a number of other OpenType features.
https://github.com/psb1558/BeowulfOT-font
Eadui
A reproduction of the English Caroline minuscule hand of the great eleventh-century Canterbury scribe Eadui Basan. It has modern and historical modes and numerous contextual alternates and other cool features. It has been available on various websites for years, though it is not as well known as Beowulf1.
https://github.com/psb1558/Eadui-Font
Cissanthemos
Based on the ninth-century Royal Bible, BL MS Royal 1 E. VI, a splendid example of insular hybrid minuscule. It contains caps in three different styles, one of which has long been available as the font "Anglo-Saxon Caps" (from 1993!), which you see everywhere. Cissanthemos has modern and historical modes and a very large number of contextual alternates, giving it an irregular, hand-made look.
https://github.com/psb1558/Cissanthemos-font
ParkerChronicle
Based on the first hand of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 173, "The Parker Chronicle." The font is named after the book because I haven't yet thought up a better name for it. With modern and historical modes and plenty of OpenType goodies. This has been seen in public precisely once, when I gave a copy to the proprietor of Blue Mountain Brewery to use on the label of "Adambeor," an Old English-themed craft beer that you can sample if you ever find yourself, post-pandemic, driving through Afton, Virginia. (He paid me for my help and the font with two cases of his really excellent beer.)
https://github.com/psb1558/ParkerChronicle-font
Joscelyn
The secretary hand font, mentioned here a few days ago.
https://github.com/psb1558/Joscelyn-font
Elstob
A modern variable font mainly for web use. If you don't know what a variable font is, visit https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/ and play around. There are lots of OpenType features, outlined in an accompanying document, and these are also available in a desktop version, ElstobD. This has been submitted to Google Fonts, but they're so backed up, I don't know when they'll get to it, if ever.
Repository: https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font Releases: https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font/releases
Finally there's Junicode-new (https://github.com/psb1558/Junicode-New), a long-term project to expand, modernize and improve my rather long-in-the-tooth Junicode font, but there are no usable fonts in that repository yet.
May we all dodge the virus and come through the next few harrowing months sane and in good health!
Peter
Peter S. Baker Professor and Director of Graduate Admissions Department of English University of Virginia P.O. Box 400121 Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4121
