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 2.0 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 (the new mapping scheme also provides better access to the glyphs for OS/2 users). 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. For some reason, the TrueType version does not work under some versions of OS/2, so I have generated both TrueType and Adobe Type I fonts. OS/2 applications which support codepage 1004 (Windows encoding) may use the full range of extended characters provided.

      (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 © 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.