                   Readme file for JSL Blackletter font
                               Version 2.1
                             6 December 2000

The "JSL Blackletter" font is based upon a typeface created  by  William
Bullokar, for his "Booke at large, for the amendment of orthographie for
English speech", published in 1580 by  Henrie  Denham.   In  this  book,
Bullokar  attempted to regularise the spelling of English by adding some
letters to the English alphabet (mostly  combinations  of  two  letters,
such as "sh" or "ph"), and by using accents to mark the pronunciation of
vowels.

He also provided several example typefaces,  including  the  blackletter
alphabet  which  is  the basis for this font.  His new letters have been
removed, as I originally designed this font for the  purpose  of  repro-
ducing some blackletter broadside ballads which used the normal  English
orthography  of  the period.  (Obviously, his idea was met with the same
enthusiasm that was shown to the Metric System by the United States...)

This is version 2.1 of the fonts.  Originally,  the  archaic  characters
and  ligatures had been mapped primarily to the "unused" character cells
in the Windows fonts.   Unfortunately,  certain  Microsoft  applications
ignore  these  unused  cells,  rendering  those characters inaccessible.
Therefore, the archaic glyphs have been remapped to less-frequently-used
positions.  New ligatures (fi/ffi) have also  been added, due to popular
request.  Furthermore, the fonts  are  now  edit-embeddable,  to  permit
creation of Adobe Acrobat documents and Web pages with embedded fonts.

These fonts were produced with Fontographer  3.5.2.   Because  they  use
ANSI  encoding,  the glyph mapping will be somewhat different under OS/2
and the Macintosh.

Version 2.1 moved  the  "ff"  ligature  to  a  different  position;  its
previous  placement prevented the use of the Catalan raised period.  The
macron has also been changed to a non-advancing glyph, positioned  above
the  previous character (to facilitate the overline abbreviations common
common to Renaissance printing).


   Win                         
   Code   JSL Blackletter   Arial
   --------------------------------------------------------------
   0131   Long 's'          florin (script f)
   0165   'st' ligature     Yen currency symbol
   0171   Dotless 'i'       double left guillemet
   0172   'oo' ligature     logical not
   0176   Half 'r'          degree symbol
   0177   'ss' ligature     plus or minus symbol
   0164   'ff' ligature     raised period


JSL Blackletter is copyright (c) 1997-2000 by Jeffrey S. Lee. Permission
is granted to freely distribute  it,  provided  that  it  is distributed
unaltered, and it is accompanied by this  text  file.   It  may  not  be
included  in  any  commercial  package without prior permission from the
author.  This font is "emailware"; if you like it and decide to use  it,
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 font.

                                           Jeff Lee
                                           http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/
                                           shipbrk@gate.net
