JSL Ancient

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/

[email protected]