Tuesday, May 08, 2012

A #font for ancient scripts


#Wikipedia refers to and #Wikisource includes sources that were written millennia ago. Sources that inform us about when what is now the western culture was centred in places like Athens, Crete or Karnak. The scripts used were different from modern scripts but like modern scripts many of them can and did make the transition into the digital age. They were encoded in Unicode and there are fonts available for these scripts.

George Douras has been really active in the creation of fonts for ancient scripts. There are many available from his website. The message about licensing is plain and simple and is probably all that is required. George is happy to see his fonts used as webfonts and is willing to help when there are issues with his font.

The list of what he has on offer is impressive:
Aegean Numbers, Alchemical Symbols, Anatolian Hieroglyphs, Ancient Greek Musical Notation, Ancient Greek Numbers, Ancient Roman Symbols, Arkalochori Axe, Arrows, Basic Latin, Block Elements, Box Drawing, Braille Patterns, Byzantine Musical Symbols, Carian, Combining Diacritical Marks, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Combining Half Marks, Control Pictures, Coptic, Counting Rod Numerals, Cretan Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, Currency Symbols, Cypriot Syllabary, Cypro-Minoan, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Supplement, Deseret, Dingbats, Dispilio tablet, Domino Tiles, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Egyptian Transliteration characters, Emoticons, Gardiner set of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, General Punctuation, Geometric Shapes, Gothic, Greek and Coptic, Greek Extended, Hieratic alphabet, IPA Extensions, Last Resort font glyphs, Letterlike Symbols, Linear A, Linear B Ideograms, Linear B Syllabary, Local variants of Ancient Greek and Old Italic alphabets, Lycian, Lydian, Mahjong Tiles, Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Mathematical Operators, Maya Hieroglyphs, Meroitic, Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A, Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs, Miscellaneous Technical, Musical Symbols, Number Forms, Old Italic, Old Persian, Optical Character Recognition, Phaistos Disc, Phoenician, Phrygian, Playing Cards, Sidetic, Spacing Modifier Letters, Specials, Superscripts and Subscripts, Supplemental Arrows-A, Supplemental Arrows-B, Supplemental Mathematical Operators, Supplemental Punctuation, Tai Xuan Jing Symbols, Transport And Map Symbols, Troy vessels’ signs, Ugaritic, Yijing Hexagram Symbols, Text Fonts based on the work of Firmin Didot (1764-1836), Richard Porson (1757-1808), Victor Julius Scholderer (1880-1971), Alexander Wilson (1714-1786), Claude Garamond (1480-1561), Demetrios Damilas (c. 1493), Robert Granjon (1513-1589) et al.
The MediaWiki WebFonts extension is enabled on Wikisource. It is therefore for the Wikisourcers to make their pick and ask on Bugzilla for a specific font.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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