About JSL Blackletter font

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 reproducing 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...)

Free for Personal Use

This fonts are authors' property, and are either shareware, demo versions or public domain. The licence mentioned above the download button is just an indication. Please look at the readme-files in the archives or check the indicated author's website for details, and contact him if in doubt. If no author/licence is indicated that's because we don't have information, that doesn't mean it's free.

JBLACK

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.shipbrook.net/jeff/
[email protected]