Occasionally, during my Copious Free Time^TM, I enjoy working with fonts. Sometimes it's to do fairly simple things, like adding Esperanto diacriticals to one of the basic fonts like Times New Roman; at other times, I enjoy creating fonts from scratch.

      I've always been fascinated by alphabets; Tolkien's Middle Earth books introduced me to the runic alphabet (or, more properly, the fuþark), as well as the artificial scripts he created for his Elves and other races. Such artificial alphabets also abound in science fiction, such as the Klingon pIQaD or the Tenctonese sinescript.

      As an enthusiast of Renaissance literature, however, I am equally fascinated by the typefaces of days gone by. Although Caslon Antique is an omnipresent "old" typeface, it lacks some of the features of old-style type, such as the long 's' and certain ligatures.

      My most ambitious typographical achievement so far has been to re-create an antique roman/italic typeface pair, complete with ligatures and obsolete characters. Basing the fonts on nearly identical typefaces used by two English printers in the mid-to-late 1600s (Edward Jones and J. Redmayne), I strove to create as faithful a reproduction as I could manage. Using standard typeface classification terminology, it is a transitional or Baroque Oldstyle font.

      I have decided to make these fonts publicly available as freeware, but would appreciate an email from anyone who uses them. (No, I won't charge you for them or mail you annoying spam -- I'm just curious as to how many people use them, and what people think of them.)

      The fonts are available in TrueType and Adobe Type I formats; please see the readme.txt file included in the zip archives for a table of the special characters, plus information on redistribution of the fonts. If you want to redistribute these fonts, please comply with the simple terms in the readme file.

      I use Fontographer 3.5.2 to create my fonts; it does an excellent job, and provides a great deal of flexibility when creating the glyphs.

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Font Samples

JSL Ancient

JSL Ancient Italic

JSL Blackletter

JSL Font Converter is a 32-bit Windows utility which will take whatever text is in the Windows clipboard, convert it to use the obsolete characters and ligatures of any of the "JSL" historical fonts, and put the modified text back into the clipboard.