From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 15:13:26 EDT
At 10:07 AM 02-10-02, P. T. Rourke wrote:
>Just for an additional note: the usual place to look for Greek and Latin
>abbreviations and ligatures is Thompson, "Introduction to Greek and Latin
>Paleography" (not the "Handbook to Greek Paleography"). In miniscule
>manuscripts and miniscule typography (e.g., Aldus), they are very, very
>common, and the list of abbreviations and ligatures is, as suggested
>already, very long. I've been writing something on just this issue just
>this past week. I would assume that they should be represented in
>electronic texts with their normalized values and marked up to indicate
>the ligatures in a higher protocol...
That's the approach I've taken with Clio, an ongoing research project with
a font at the end, which I presented at the recent type conferences in
Thessaloniki and Rome. The font is in OpenType format, with basic Greek
encoding support and 900+ ligatures accessed by glyph substitution
features. The next stage is to research contextual ligature and alternate
substitution as employed by Byzantine scribes. Having examined a number of
cursive Greek types, I've come to the conclusion that any 'rules' for
ligature formation may only have been partially understood by typesetters,
and it will be necessary to examine many more manuscript sources to
determine what the scribes did when and why.
I would be interested to know what you have been writing on this subject.
It is an area of great interest to me, but I have only a little time to
pursue my research since it doesn't pay any bills.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Those books that allow us to forget the most
are accorded the status of a classic.
- James Secord
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