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-----Original Message-----
From: Francis Steen [mailto:steen@humanitas.ucsb.edu]
Sent: Saturday, July 17, 1999 6:41 PM
To: info@unicode.org
Subject: Early Modern fonts
Dear Unicode,
I am a scholar of the Restoration period in England (1660-1714)
interested in reproducing the look of print publications from this
period on my PC and on the internet.
For an example, see
http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/users/steen/EarlyModern/My_wife_will_be.html
I'm currently using a set of TrueType fonts to reproduce early modern
typesetting - JSL Ancient, JSL Ancient Italic, and JSL Blackletter.
These fonts use several characters that don't have direct counterparts
in a modern font. For instance, early modern English fonts have two
s-characters; one is used at the end of words, the other elsewhere (as
in Ancient Greek). Moreover, they have a number of joined characters
(ligatures), such as ff, st, ct, and fl.
My question to you is, Are these characters defined in the unicode
standard? What is the appropriate character set to use?
My current fonts, running under Windows98, display correctly in
Netscape but fail on a subset of characters in IE5 and Word97 (details
below). I'm trying to understand the level at which this problem
occurs.
Sincerely yours,
Francis F. Steen
UC Santa Barbara
<steen@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Here are the details:
No display problems in Netscape
First, all characters display correctly in Netscape (4.04), so it
can't be a Win98 problem per se. They also print fine from Netscape.
Display problems in IE5
Second, my IE5 disregards font codes for character values above 127.
It just uses the default font. This means that all accented letters
appear correctly, but in the wrong font. Worse, since my fonts are
constrained to use nonstandard mappings, characters such as high-s (f,
f, and f, on 159/0131 or f) and the ligature sh (? and ?, on 0135 or
?), along with a dozen others, display incorrectly. On the other hand,
IE5 does displays the ligature sh in the Junius font (}), another
early modern font approximation, where it is mapped onto 125, or }.
Display problems in Word97
Third, there are two characters which Word97 for some reason won't
display correctly: the ff (Z, Z, and Z) ligature, which is mapped onto
0142, or Z; and the ct ligature (z and z), which is mapped onto 0158,
or z. It does, however, display both the ff (}) and ct (½) ligatures
correctly in the Junius Modern font, where they are mapped to 171 and
125, or ½ and }.
The JSL fonts can be downloaded for free from Jeff Lee's Computer
Typography page at http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/typograf.html. At the
moment, they can't be embedded.
<eof>
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