The Unicode website is essential.
The Apple Font Tools, available from the Apple developer's font page are excellent for programmatically augmenting fonts, for validating certain aspects of Truetype fonts, and for dumping Truetype font data in XML format.
Fontlab is the most powerful font editor I've been able find to date.
This font set is based on the Bitstream Vera fonts released to the free software community under a licence which permits changing the fonts and redistributing the changed versions as long as the name of the font is changed (see the Gnome fonts webpage). If you're curious about the reason for the choice of new name (or if you just want to hear Vera Lynn singing her signature number) see this Vera Lynn website (or the locally cached version).
The aesthetic of the Vera fonts emphasizes the character body and uses short ascenders/descenders making them particularly clear for onscreen use. The Vera fonts as released were very well hinted, making them the best choice on which to base the ePSD fonts.
The goal is to develop the Lynn fonts to give all the coverage necessary for ancient Near Eastern linguistic work, primarily within the framework of the Unicode standard. A few characters will be made available in the Private Use Area. It is intended that the new characters continue the excellent hinting of the Vera originals, but no hinting has so far been done on added characters.
Ŋ ŋ
Lynn provides half square brackets in both the Private Use Area and in the Unicode Miscellanous Technical Block, the latter being properly speaking extensible square bracket constructor parts. Internally, no square brackets (half- or full-) are used in the XTF format, but partially damage to signs is represented in web display using the following characters:
It is probably necessary to install the Lynn fonts in order to view these characters on current systems.
[More on PSD fonts starting from the top of this page]
You can download the fonts now and follow the system-specific installation instructions directory/folder below, but the current downloadables and instructions are not very user-friendly yet.
The Lynn fonts are not presently used by ePSD as we have chosen for the present to adopt an approach to web-fonts which does not require users to download and install any fonts; we do this by using the degree symbol instead of half-brackets; using g+circumflex instead of eng (for display only--internally we still use the Unicode eng/Eng codepoints); and relying on the steadily improving Unicode support of current operating systems for other accented characters.
If you are trying to deploy the Lynn fonts and would like to test whether your fonts are installed and in use, you can take a look at this screen shot of one version of this page being viewed with the Lynn fonts in use.
E-mail PSD Staff [Last edited: 05/10/05].
