Readme file for JSL Ancient fonts
19 August 1997
The "JSL Ancient" and "JSL Ancient Italic" fonts are based upon two
nearly identical typefaces of seventeenth-century English printers.
The first source used was "A compendious view of the late tumults &
troubles in this kingdom by way of annals for seven years", by James
Wright, printed by Edward Jones in 1685; the second was "Ars Pictoria,
or an Academy treating of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching", by
Alexander Browne, printed by J. Redmayne in 1668.
The two source typefaces are nearly identical, and the most interesting
features, such as the descender on the italic capital N, are present
in both. I used Redmayne's typeface primarily to fill in the missing
letters from Jones'. Both typefaces had several different versions of
certain italic capitals; I chose the more interesting ones. One feature
of Redmayne's italic typeface that was lacking in Jones' was the
peculiar extensions of horizontal strokes, used to reduce the amount of
whitespace used when justifying shorter lines of text. (I may eventually
produce a "JSL Ancient Italic Bold" which includes these extended
letters.)
I used Fontographer 3.5.2 to produce these fonts. Because they use
ANSI encoding, the glyph mapping will be somewhat different under OS/2
and the Macintosh. For some reason, the TrueType version does not work
under OS/2, so I have generated both TrueType and Adobe Type I fonts.
Unfortunately, most of the cool ligatures are not used by the default
OS/2 codepage (which all of the applications seem to use, regardless of
the config.sys setting), so they're pretty much inaccessible.
The ISO Latin-1 characters (32-127, 160-255) are all present; many of
the extended Windows characters (128-159) are present as well, but some
have been replaced in order to provide certain ligatures and archaic
characters:
Character JSL Ancient
Code JSL Ancient Italic Arial
-----------------------------------------------------------------
0129 Alternate 'v' unused
0130 'sl' ligature bottom single quote
0131 Long 's' Long 's' florin (script f)
0132 'll' ligature bottom double quote
0134 'st' ligature 'st' ligature dagger
0135 'sh' ligature 'sh' ligature double dagger
0142 'ff' ligature 'ff' ligature unused
0143 'is' ligature unused
0157 'ss' ligature 'ss' ligature unused
0158 'ct' ligature 'ct' ligature unused
(A blank entry in JSL Ancient indicates that the code refers to the same
character as in Arial.)
Under OS/2, the only special character available is the long 's', which
can be accessed as Alt-159.
Certain Windows 3.1 printer drivers do not output characters which are
"unused" by the base Windows character sets (such as the 'ct' ligature)
unless the "Output TrueType fonts as graphics" box is checked in the
printer driver. This problem may or may not occur under Windows 95, but
I can't say for certain.
JSL Ancient and JSL Ancient Italic are copyright (c) 1997 by Jeffrey S.
Lee. Permission is granted to freely distribute them, provided that
they are distributed unaltered, both the roman and italic versions are
distributed together, and they are accompanied by this text file. They
may not be included in any commercial package without prior permission
from the author. These fonts are "emailware"; if you like them and
decide to use them, please send me email at the address listed below. I
will not charge you any money or send you annoying email spam; I'm
simply interested in who's using it, and I'd be happy to receive any
comments you might have about the fonts.
Jeff Lee
http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/
shipbrk@gate.net