Text of mideavel gravestones in OpenType?

[_Marc_Verbeek_]

We're planning a book about ancient gravestones in the Sint-Jans Cathedral in Den Bosch Holland. The author confronted me with the following:

During the ages, all kinds of abbreviations were used in the engravings. Some of them can be found in the Open Type character-map, some others are less common I'm afraid. A few examples:

- a "v", "V" and "y" with a dash above it
- superscript "O" with a dash underneath it
- a "b", "h" with a dash right through the middle
- a "C" upside down
etc.

What are the options: Is it probably very costly to have these special glyphs added to a font and it would inflict with copyright too I'm afraid. Or is there a simpler solution in connection to InDesign on a Windows-platform?

[Thomas Phinney]

I don't know if there's a font family that already supports what you need, but I doubt it.

Some type foundries allow modification of their fonts, others do not. It's a matter of checking the specific license. One could also contact the foundry about making such modifications.

I would recommend hiring a professional to do the modifications. Given the costs of buying high-end font-editing software for yourself, it isn't going to cost you much more, and will get better results.

Regards,

T

Thomas Phinney
Fonts Program Mgr.
Adobe Systems

[_Txortx_]

Hello Marc,

The only font I know that have all the abbreviations you mention is Garamond 1530 by Tiro TypeWorks (www.tiro.com). One of the weights in this font is RomanArchaics which contains a lot of archaic abbreviations, signs and accents.

I hope this can help you.

Jordi