Add Junicode

[eliheuer]

As a variable font.
https://github.com/Fromager/junicode

[psb1558]

As the developer of Junicode, I can see a problem or two here. The biggest issue is that the character set in the bold faces is much smaller than that in the regular and italic, and so it won't meet the requirement that all faces have the same character set without considerable work (the regular and italic match, however). It would be a good bit of work to make it into a variable font because the different sources aren't compatible in the appropriate way. The project was developed in FontForge, which is lossy dealing with TrueType outlines, so a number of outlines are just plain bad. (The condensed version, by someone I don't know, isn't really a different version at all, but just scaled horizontally.)

The repository linked to above appears to be a four-year-old stub with just a few files in it. I have begun to rework the font here:

https://github.com/psb1558/Junicode-New

But given the size of the thing, this is going to take some time.

[eliheuer]

Excellent, thank you for posting that new repo link here. Cleaning up the outlines for interpolation and adding some characters to the bold doesn't seem lime too much work for a well known and liked typeface like this one. I'll try a PR if I can find some time to work on it.

[psb1558]

That would be great. This is not my day-job, and I plug away slowly. I believe the task is pretty obvious: create bold outlines where they are missing, and then the creation of the light and condensed variants can be (mostly) automated. As of now the sources are Glyphs files.

[psb1558]

A progress report, since revision of Junicode reached a landmark today, with the roman character set complete (that is all four masters complete and compatible, though many outlines still need to be neatened up). The font covers the complete Medieval Unicode Font Initiative specification, v. 4.0, and it retains all the stuff requested for Junicode over the years by phoneticians, Egyptologists, etc.

I haven't yet begun to use FontMake for this, but am generating with Glyphs. Static TTFs. I have managed to generate a variable font, but it doesn't seem to work (yet). May try it with FM. I haven't dared to run it through FontBakery yet: I assume it would fail catastrophically. The repo is here, and there is also a specimen page, mainly for showing off its various features.

The project has attracted some attention, with the result that I'm getting a steady stream of bug reports--very important in a project this size. I encourage any interested persons to test and open issues when they find bugs.

Next comes neatening up roman outlines and work on the italic, for which about 42% is complete.

[psb1558]

Hard to believe that @eliheuer opened this issue more than four years ago. I have been working on this font steadily (and in recent weeks frantically), and it has finally reached a point where I think it may be of interest to GF.

Reminder: Junicode has been around since the 1990s, when Unicode-encoded fonts were a new thing, and it was based on an earlier old-style font of mine named "Junius"—thus the stupid name, which I can't do anything about now (believe me, I've tried). Since the early 2000s the font has tracked with the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, which identifies Unicode characters of interest to medievalists and encodes many more in the Private Use Area.

One of the missions of the current version of Junicode is to provide access to all MUFI characters, but in an accessible way through the liberal use of OpenType features, bypassing the PUA characters with their well-known disadvantages. Hence it has an unusually large collection of OpenType features: for example, it uses almost all the cvNN and ssNN features, plus many more.

Junicode now comes in both variable and static versions, with two standard axes, weight (Light–Bold) and width (Condensed–Expanded), plus one custom axis, “Enlarge” (ENLA), vaguely similar to Optical Size but designed to handle a particular problem of medieval transcription—that manuscript sentences often begin with letters that are lowercase in shape and intermediate betwen lower- and uppercase in size.

The variable version of Junicode is manually hinted; the static version is hinted with ttfautohint, but with manual overrides where needed.

Junicode has been around, and more or less continuously under development, for a long time. It has certainly got imperfections and inconsistencies, despite my efforts to clean it up. Yet people seem to like it, and it is considered one of the foremost fonts for medievalists, linguists, classicists, and others.

Junicode reached version 2.000 today. You can see it here.