                    Readme file for JSL Ancient fonts
                               Version 2.1
                             6 December 2000

The "JSL Ancient" and "JSL Ancient Italic"  fonts  are  based  upon  two
nearly  identical  typefaces  of  seventeenth-century  English printers.
The first source used was "A compendious view  of  the  late  tumults  &
troubles  in  this  kingdom  by way of annals for seven years", by James
Wright, printed by Edward Jones in 1685; the second was  "Ars  Pictoria,
or  an  Academy  treating of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching", by
Alexander Browne, printed by J. Redmayne in 1668.  

The two source typefaces are nearly identical, and the most  interesting
features,  such  as  the  descender on the italic capital N, are present
in both.  I used Redmayne's typeface primarily to fill  in  the  missing
letters  from  Jones'.  Both typefaces had several different versions of
certain italic capitals; I chose the more interesting ones.  One feature
of  Redmayne's  italic  typeface  that  was  lacking  in  Jones' was the
peculiar extensions of horizontal strokes, used to reduce the amount  of
whitespace used when justifying shorter lines of text. (I may eventually
produce  a  "JSL  Ancient  Italic  Bold"  which  includes these extended
letters.)

Extremely similar (in some cases, virtually identical) typefaces were in
use in England from the late 1500s through the 1700s, so these fonts are
suitable for a wide range of historical reproduction applications.

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 "sl" and "ff" ligatures  to  different  positions;
the  former  because  its previous position interfered with certain word
processors which used the superscript "2" character for  footnotes,  and
the  latter  because  it 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 to Renaissance printing).


   Win                      JSL Ancient
   Code   JSL Ancient       Italic            Arial
   ---------------------------------------------------------------
   0131   Long 's'          Long 's'          florin (script f)
   0162   'ct' ligature     'ct' ligature     cents currency symbol
   0165   'st' ligature     'st' ligature     Yen currency symbol
   0171                     'is' ligature     double left guillemet
   0172   'sh' ligature     'sh' ligature     logical not
   0176   'fi' ligature     'fi' ligature     degree symbol
   0177   'ss' ligature     'ss' ligature     plus or minus symbol
   0166                     'sl' ligature     superscript 2
   0181   'ffi' ligature    'ffi' ligature    micro symbol
   0164   'ff' ligature     'ff' ligature     raised period
   0187                     'll' ligature     double right guillemet
   0247                     Alternate 'v'     divided-by symbol

(A blank entry in JSL Ancient indicates that the code refers to the same
character as in Arial.)

JSL Ancient and JSL  Ancient  Italic  are  copyright  (c)  1997-2000  by
Jeffrey  S.  Lee.   Permission  is  granted  to  freely distribute them,
provided that they are distributed unaltered, both the roman and  italic
versions are distributed together, and they are accompanied by this text
file.  They may not be included in any commercial package without  prior
permission  from  the  author.  These fonts are "emailware"; if you like
them and decide to use them, 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 fonts.

                                           Jeff Lee
                                           http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/
                                           shipbrk@gate.net
