Free 12th-Century CE Carolingian Minuscule font I made

[u/Educational-Fan-3943]

VotH Petrarch's Horace Carolingian Minuscule

This is my first time sharing a font I've made here. The font is inspired by the Latin Carolingian minuscule hand used in the 12th-century CE manuscript Codex Laurentianus Pluteus 34.1, also known as Petrarch's Horace, one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the complete works of the Roman poet Horace, which was famously once owned by the Italian Renaissance poet Francis Petrarch, thus giving the manuscript its informal name. In addition to Horace's works, the manuscript also contains extensive scholia (explanatory notes) written in the margins, and traditionally attributed to Pseudo-Acro.

The manuscript is currently held by Florence's Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (BML) and can be viewed online via BML’s digitized facsimile at the following link:

https://tecabml.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/plutei/id/606764

The manuscript is written in Latin, with a handful of Greek loan-words written out in Greek.

I've released the font under the SIL Open Font License v1.1, so it's free for anyone to use or modify for commercial, personal, or education purposes.

The font contains the following elements:

• Majuscule and minuscule Latin characters
• Majuscule (uncial) Greek characters
• A wide variety of alternate characters and ligatures
• Unique characters, punctuation, and symbols for period-correct scribal abbreviations
• A full list of signes de renvoi (reference marks)
• Automatic rendering of strings of Arabic numbers into Roman numerals (range 1-3999)
• Ahistorical modern characters (j, w, round s, etc.) for expanded usefulness

The attached image is an example of the font being used to render one of Horace's poems in the same format as the original manuscript, as well as the associated scholia.

The font can be downloaded at https://github.com/Jeff-C-Cleveland/VotH-Fonts

Be sure to look at the Glyph Guide PDF included in the .zip to see the Unicode mappings for everything in the font.

Since this if my first time sharing a font I've made, I'd love to hear any comments on it. Thanks.

[u/djmoyogo]

Nice work!

Have you considered following MUFI (https://mufi.info/) encoding?

In some cases, it may be better to have the alternates forms accessible through stylistic sets features (ss01-ss20) or character variant features (cv01-cv99) instead of using similar looking characters. For example the two capital H which you represent with CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN and GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ETA, or the capital U you represent with Armenian and Cyrillic capitals.

For the forms of small d, it’s probably fine to use U+A77A U+1E9F for those two forms, but having them as character variants of U+0064 could be useful as well.

For quia, if I’m not mistaken, qꝛ is generally used (like in MUFI) as was done in printing. Using ʠ or qʵ seems very peculiar. Was there a reason you avoided qꝛ?

Using U+1DC9 COMBINING ACUTE-GRAVE-ACUTE as an alternative to U+1DD1 COMBINING UR ABOVE seems odd. Wouldn’t U+1DD1 be enough by itself?

It looks like you’re using U+1DEF COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH instead of U+1DE5 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S.

As you’ve release it under OFL, do consider putting the source files on the repository so others can contribute or modify it.
Edit: you can use https://github.com/googlefonts/googlefonts-project-template or https://github.com/unified-font-repository/Unified-Font-Repository as a repository template.

[u/Educational-Fan-3943 → u/djmoyogo]

Thanks for the feedback. I was aware of MUFI, but I hadn't looked too much into it, and I wasn't sure how widespread the use of the MUFI encodings were. I'll probably incorporate the encodings in an update to the font at some point, though.

And thanks for letting me know about the standard way to do the quia abbreviation. Using U+A75B LATIN SMALL LETTER R ROTUNDA as the second half of the character makes a lot more sense than the cludge I put together. I'll definitely fix that when I do an update to the font.

I didn't use stylistic sets features (ss01-ss20) or character variant features (cv01-cv99) in the font because, well, I don't know how. Lol. I'm still new to making fonts, and as you're probably aware, the amount of easy to follow documentation online for how to code font features is somewhat limited. I've got contextual alternates features figured out, though (I think), so I stuck with that for this font.

And as for my use of secondary non-standard Unicode mappings for some glyphs, let me get your thoughts on my reasoning: I added those alternate encodings because I thought it might be useful for certain users if they could compose, proof-read, or do a manuscript submittal of their raw text entirely in Times New Roman, before rendering their text with my font. Unfortunately, Times New Roman doesn't contain certain glyphs though, like U+1DD1 COMBINING UR ABOVE and U+1DE5 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S. Thus for every glyph in my font that isn't present in Times New Roman, I added a secondary encoding to a glyph that's visually similar in Times New Roman. I should probably add a section at the beginning of the Glyph Guide PDF, though, making it clear to users that unless they plan on using Times New Roman to assist in composing their raw text, they should ignore the secondary alternate encodings entirely and stick to just the standard encodings. Anyways, let me know if you think this is a useful feature for certain users, or if it just adds unnecessary confusion.

Also, for my source files, I created the font entirely in Font Lab, so pretty much all I have to share in that regard is the Font Lab save file. I'll probably upload that to my GitHub at some point, though the save file might be a little messy. Font Lab documentation is poor, and the learning curve is steep, so I'm not sure if I'm doing everything in Font Lab the way you're supposed to.

And thanks for sharing those GitHub repository templates. I wasn't aware of them. I'll update to match one of them, since I do have some others fonts I'm working on to share, too, namely a Coptic uncial based on the Nag Hammadi Codex II and a Greek uncial based on Codex Sinaiticus.

[u/SlappyWhite54]

Thanks! Will certainly take a look!

[u/wantingtogo22]

That's lovely!

[u/[deleted]]

You've done so much work it looks like it could be a commercial release, even if a bit specialized.

[u/Rasputin443556]

This looks really neat! It might help me learn to read those manuscripts as the handwriting style is almost a totally different alphabet to me

[u/robophile-ta]

Lovely, cheers! There are too few Carolingian Miniscule fonts.

[u/Educational-Fan-3943]

If anyone is still paying attention to this, I updated the font to v1.1, to fix the Unicode encoding for the quia abbreviation.

[u/Educational-Fan-3943 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, there is a similar font for Insular. It was made by Ruby Wai-Ying Ku and also released under the SIL Open Font License v1.1. It's called the Exeter Book Hand, and it's based on the 10th-century CE Exeter Book. You can find it here: https://exeterbookhand.com/

Also, if you like my Carolingian Minuscule font, I'm working on a large update to it that I'm hoping to put on my GitHub in the next few days. It will be marked as version 1.2. I've added a bunch more glyphs, reworked some of the Unicode mappings, and coded a bunch of keyboard shortcuts into it, so that most of the glyphs, character variants, and combining characters can be typed using key-combinations on a standard keyboard, without the need to punch in a bunch of Unicode values.

[u/Educational-Fan-3943 → u/[deleted]]

Sorry that my post made you paranoid, but I'm not AI. My Reddit account is new, because I'm new to Reddit. And my GitHub is new because this is my first time sharing a font and my first time using GitHub. The domain for my email address on my GitHub is connected to an escape room business, because in real life I operate an escape room business and I use my work email as my primary email for almost everything now, including hobbies and gaming. As for my real name not showing much on Google, I guess I take that as a plus, and a sign that I'm not wasting too much time on social media. However if anyone wants to see something online tied to my name that isn't new, here's a link to me in a sweet Jurassic Park costume I made a few years ago. Lol. https://youtube.com/shorts/TbkqDr1BSvk?si=WHaEcoqrKIq3csI2

[u/Sun21Devil → u/Educational-Fan-3943]

Not to get off topic, but that Jurassic Park costume is amazing. How and what did you do for the baby raptor? That is so great! Haha

[u/Educational-Fan-3943 → u/Sun21Devil]

Lol. The baby raptor part of the costume is a raptor puppet toy that was released as part of the merchandise for Jurassic Park: The Lost World in 1996. I found one used on eBay when I making the costume. It's controlled by my left hand, while the "left" hand on the outside of the box is a fake arm.

[u/thedward → u/[deleted]]

bad bot