Fonts, Characters, and Glyphs

= Fonts, characters, and glyphs =

The representation of "unusual characters" is a common problem for medievalists working in digital media. "Unusual characters" can range from relatively common accented letters which are not available from a standard computer keyboard to variant letter forms, archaic symbols, abbreviations, and letters no longer used in modern languages. Because the standard computer keyboard varies from country to country and language to language, accented characters that are "unusual" to some medievalists may be quite ordinary to others. "Unusual characters" are encoded at the "emic" rather than "etic" level; that is to say that the encoding of such characters involves the representation of generalisable and repeated textual symbols rather than unique manuscript forms. The decision as to which distinctions are emic and etic requires disciplinary knowledge; it also can vary in some cases from project to project within a single discipline depending on the purpose of the encoding.

Source(s): Fonts, Characters, and Glyphs

Terminology
Contemporary usage distinguishes among a number of closely related terms:


 * 'character' (abstract character)
 * An (abstract) unit of information used for the organization, control, or representation of textual data. Abstract characters have no concrete form, although certain features may be considered essential. The diagraph æ, for example, can be considered a character. Its essential feature is that it combines the characters for a and e. Characters should not be confused with, , or . Some characters are not (complete) letters (e.g. Diaeresis: ¨). Other characters are complete letter (e.g. small latin letter a). Upper and lower case forms of letters are different characters.


 * 'font'
 * A set of mechanically or digitally produced s in a uniform style. Fonts are found only in type- or digital cultures; the equivalent in a manuscript culture is a . Differences between fonts (or scripts) are generally considered accidental in transcription and encoding.


 * 'glyph'
 * The idealised form of a given in a specific, , or . The following are all distinct glyphs :
 * Roman small latin letter a;
 * Arial small latin letter a;
 * Sans-serif small latin letter a;
 * Carolingian small letter a;
 * Insular miniscule a;
 * Scribe D's open a.


 * 'graph'
 * A specific (etic-level) instance of a : "The poorly formed carolingian a in the first word of manuscript line 1 on f. 72v" refers to a graph. Distinguished from.


 * 'grapheme'
 * An emic-level description of a specific . This is opposed to, which is an etic-level description. E.g. "the third letter a on folio 105v is a poorly formed carolingian a" distinguishes between a (the poorly-formed third letter a) and a grapheme (the ideal of carolingian letter a).


 * 'letter'
 * an imprecise term used variously to refer to and  at emic or etic levels.


 * 'script'
 * the manuscript equivalent to a in print culture (cf. Carolingian script and Times Roman font).

Unicode Fonts
The following is a list of (open source) Unicode fonts Medievalists are likely to find useful:


 * Junicode. A Serif unicode font designed by Peter Baker of the University of Virginia. Contains most if not all characters required by Anglo-Saxonists and other medievalists, including manuscript abbreviations and IPA characters.


 * Garamond Latin. "It contains GaramondLatin, a professionally produced typeface that provides macrons, brevia, apices/stress marks, common inscriptional characters, characters for printing scanned poetry, and a few medieval and religious symbols. Click here to see a .jpg filethat shows all the characters. Both True Type and Type 1 (for use with AdobeType Manager) fonts are included."

Unicode Tools and Resources
The following is a list of tools and resources Medievalists are likely to find useful in using Unicode:


 * http://www.eki.ee/letter/ Letter database: languages, character sets, names etc:. A web-based search engine that can be used for finding unicode code points in both hex and decimal formats (among many other things).


 * http://alanwood.net/unicode/ Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources:. Link lists with evaluations of software, including fonts, browsers, and production tools that support them.


 * http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1829212. KMFL lets users change keyboards on the fly. A linux equivalent of the well known Keyman keyboard mapping software under Windows.


 * http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/1649204 Graphite: Smart font technology comes to FOSS. A "smart font" technology comparable to OpenType and Advanced Apple

Typography, available for both Linux and Windows.

Source(s): Fonts, Characters, and Glyphs

Related topics

 * MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative)
 * Junicode
 * Unicode