The "JSL Blackletter" font is based upon a typeface created by William Bullokar, for his "Booke at large, for the amendment of orthographie for English speech", published in 1580 by Henrie Denham. In this book, Bullokar attempted to regularise the spelling of English by adding some letters to the English alphabet (mostly combinations of two letters, such as "sh" or "ph"), and by using accents to mark the pronunciation of vowels.

      He also provided several example typefaces, including the blackletter alphabet which is the basis for this font. His new letters have been removed, as I originally designed this font for the purpose of reproducing some blackletter broadside ballads which used the normal English orthography of the period. (Obviously, his idea was met with the same enthusiasm that was shown to the Metric System by the United States...)

      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). 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.

      JSL Blackletter is copyright © 1997-2000 by Jeffrey S. Lee. Permission is granted to freely distribute it, provided that it is distributed unaltered, and it is accompanied by this text file. It may not be included in any commercial package without prior permission from the author. This font is "emailware"; if you like it and decide to use it, 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 font.