What does a type designer need to know in order to make types for specialist scholarly publishing? In this paper, John Hudson uses projects for Dumbarton Oaks, Brill, and Harvard University Press to illustrate different kinds of knowledge about writing systems, aesthetic canons, and technical requirements, and discusses how these are integrated in the font making process. Specialist scholarship represents a particular challenge for type design, requiring the fullest level of engagement and exchange of knowledge between font makers and users.

Fonts such as Dumbarton Oaks’ Athena Ruby unites two countervailing scholarly impulses: to depict a text-bearing object and to interpret it. Those cross-purposes make the font a vehicle for interpretations ineffable, ambiguous, and vague, both intentional and unintentional. To argue for this point, I outline the scholarly rationale behind Athena Ruby, starting with its context—the history of publishing at Dumbarton Oaks—and proceeding to the decisions that were made in its design. I focus on the unavoidable theoretical challenges that lie at the heart of diplomatic transcriptions, and the challenges that remain. The project shows not only that technology and scholarship have their limits, but that those limits are amorphous, even porous. Fonts such as Athena Ruby are, I argue, products and tools of interpretation, and when used the best, will spark insight, discovery, and even dispute.

There are two sorts of computer fonts for the representation of letters and other devices on medieval coins. Those such as Inscription Numismatic (IN) aim at a simple stylised representation. The one at present being pioneered by the Royal Belgian Numismatic Society aims at a literal reproduction of the individual letters. Attempts at the latter in British numismatics long predate computers, for example the BMC of the coins of the Norman kings (1916).

Something similar was attempted in the creation of a font depicting the specific letter forms of the Gros Tournois (1997). This not only led to a far greater understanding of the series but also (its primary aim) to facilitate recording.

The chief objection to the exact reproduction of letters is that it is potentially misleading since the variation is such that the reader can be deceived into thinking he is seeing an exact representation when in reality he is not.

IN was originally a print font used by Oxford University Press that was developed primarily for use in English numismatics. It has limitations when used to represent non-English coinages. Thus various versions of it have been developed for specific series.

In preparing the Pimprez Hoard for publication (2011) we made use of three different fonts: two variation of IN and a specialty devised realistic font for one particular group of coins.

The elaborate letter forms used in Crusader coins have occasioned the creation of a specific font to facilitate the listing of Crusader coins.

The question now is whether Inscription Numismatic should be converted into a Unicode font and some work has been done using the Private Use Area (PUA) facility. From a purely personal point of view as co-editor of the Numismatic Chronicle I am not convinced this is necessary at present but circumstances may change. One problem is keeping control of the font since people have added their own specific characters with potentially chaotic results.

Examples of all the above will be presented.

The editing of historical text sources poses a particular challenge in terms of how to deal with special historical characters and non-standard letterforms. Whereas on the basic or plain-text level many peculiar scriptive expressions, like abbreviations or individual letterforms, can be normalized to its modern representations, on the level of diplomatic editions we want to retain the graphic specialities of the original source in the text data. The problem is: neither our modern encoding standards nor standard font software are made to handle such requirements in an easy and obvious way. The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative is an successful example of a scholarly attempt to overcome those difficulties, in order to furnish printed or online text editions with the typographical apparatus needed. The talk will explain encoding strategies and font works which lead to a considerable improvement in the handling of historic characters. It will also showcase some other international projects like Dania, CYFI, the Kempe-online project or the Andron Monetary font.

Le Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW) de Walther von Wartburg est considéré comme l’une des œuvres fondamentales de la lexicographie historique du français. L’informatisation actuelle de son contenu permet d’envisager une prochaine diffusion élargie et simplifiée.

L’élaboration du dictionnaire sous sa forme électronique nécessite une famille de caractères typographiques intégrant l’ensemble des glyphes employés pour la composition de ses articles et particulièrement les signes typographiques utilisés pour la notation de ses transcriptions phonétiques.

Fruit d’une collaboration entre l’Atelier national de recherche typographique et le Centre du FEW, la production de ces fontes est l’occasion d’envisager un encodage raisonné de caractères inédits mais également de concevoir de nouvelles formes typographiques, spécifiquement adaptées à un contenu textuel particulièrement dense.