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baroque_mongooseMy Best Online Friend is very good at a number of things, and one of them is vectors. Not the mathematical kind (well, she may be good with those as well; she's quite the all-rounder), but the graphical kind. She knows all about vector design and bezier curves and all sorts of stuff like that, which I have only a vague idea about.
So, when she saw my Carolingian minuscule, she decided it would be fun to turn it into a font for the computer. That way, I get to play with scroll layouts in GIMP without having to mess about using a lot of scrap paper, and she gets a nice font to use on posters and the like. It's a win-win. I wrote out the standard minuscule letters the other day, but I was so excited about the project that I didn't think to wait till the ink was dry before taking the photo, so there were some shiny bits; nonetheless, she still managed to work round those. Today she asked me for the capitals and the punctuation, so I was determined not to make the same mistake twice.
There is one little problem with Carolingian. It's not called "minuscule" for nothing. It doesn't actually have a standard set of capital letters. Mediaeval scribes generally used uncials, but there is a certain amount of leeway. I decided that what I wanted was an upper case alphabet which was internally consistent and fitted well with the minuscules; so what I have evolved is a mixture of uncial letters, larger versions of the minuscule letters (like the A, for instance), and hybrids like my capital R (it's just an ordinary capital R, but styled to match the capital F, which in turn is a larger version of the minuscule f). It looks right, both in itself and with the minuscules, so that's what we're using.
Carolingian punctuation is very much its own thing. It doesn't look like modern punctuation at all. The basic punctuation mark is a simple dot, but level with the tops of the small minuscule letters rather than on the base line; and that's not a full stop but a comma. The full stop is the same mark with something like a 7 underneath it. The semicolon is the comma mark with a tilde over it, and the question mark is the comma mark with a slanted tilde (bottom left to top right). They don't seem to have had an exclamation mark, so I improvised one in my practice samples, but I can't see one being needed for scrolls.
I am very much looking forward to this. I'm rather short of useful fancier fonts on my laptop; I habitually use Linux Biolinum, and even that I had to download. There is a whole slew of pre-installed Noto fonts covering every script you can think of and some besides; but, while I'll concede that Malayalam script is very beautiful, I can't actually read it. So a few more fonts I can use for English (or, for that matter, Italian) would be helpful.
It really is a perfect collaboration. She can do vector graphics but not calligraphy, and I can do calligraphy but not vector graphics. I'm immediately reminded of the academic I had the good fortune to be PA to for a while; he was brilliant at all the things I was bad at and vice versa, so we were a formidable team. Except in this case it's a little different, because there are quite a few things we're both good at; even so, this particular collaboration makes me exceedingly happy.
So, when she saw my Carolingian minuscule, she decided it would be fun to turn it into a font for the computer. That way, I get to play with scroll layouts in GIMP without having to mess about using a lot of scrap paper, and she gets a nice font to use on posters and the like. It's a win-win. I wrote out the standard minuscule letters the other day, but I was so excited about the project that I didn't think to wait till the ink was dry before taking the photo, so there were some shiny bits; nonetheless, she still managed to work round those. Today she asked me for the capitals and the punctuation, so I was determined not to make the same mistake twice.
There is one little problem with Carolingian. It's not called "minuscule" for nothing. It doesn't actually have a standard set of capital letters. Mediaeval scribes generally used uncials, but there is a certain amount of leeway. I decided that what I wanted was an upper case alphabet which was internally consistent and fitted well with the minuscules; so what I have evolved is a mixture of uncial letters, larger versions of the minuscule letters (like the A, for instance), and hybrids like my capital R (it's just an ordinary capital R, but styled to match the capital F, which in turn is a larger version of the minuscule f). It looks right, both in itself and with the minuscules, so that's what we're using.
Carolingian punctuation is very much its own thing. It doesn't look like modern punctuation at all. The basic punctuation mark is a simple dot, but level with the tops of the small minuscule letters rather than on the base line; and that's not a full stop but a comma. The full stop is the same mark with something like a 7 underneath it. The semicolon is the comma mark with a tilde over it, and the question mark is the comma mark with a slanted tilde (bottom left to top right). They don't seem to have had an exclamation mark, so I improvised one in my practice samples, but I can't see one being needed for scrolls.
I am very much looking forward to this. I'm rather short of useful fancier fonts on my laptop; I habitually use Linux Biolinum, and even that I had to download. There is a whole slew of pre-installed Noto fonts covering every script you can think of and some besides; but, while I'll concede that Malayalam script is very beautiful, I can't actually read it. So a few more fonts I can use for English (or, for that matter, Italian) would be helpful.
It really is a perfect collaboration. She can do vector graphics but not calligraphy, and I can do calligraphy but not vector graphics. I'm immediately reminded of the academic I had the good fortune to be PA to for a while; he was brilliant at all the things I was bad at and vice versa, so we were a formidable team. Except in this case it's a little different, because there are quite a few things we're both good at; even so, this particular collaboration makes me exceedingly happy.
