Readme file for JSL Blackletter font 26 August 1997 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...) I used Fontographer 3.5.2 to produce this font. Because it uses ANSI encoding, the glyph mapping will be somewhat different under OS/2 and the Macintosh. 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 Code JSL Blackletter Arial ----------------------------------------------------------------- 0131 Long 's' florin (script f) 0134 'st' ligature dagger 0135 unused double dagger 0142 'ff' ligature unused 0143 dotless 'i' unused 0144 half 'r' unused 0157 'ss' ligature unused 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 half 'r') 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 Blackletter is copyright (c) 1997 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