On 07/14/2010 06:16 AM, François Charette wrote:
In 19th-century Rome, a prince and mathematician named Baldassare
Boncompagni[1] ran his own publishing house and scholarly journal on
history of mathematics and physics, the “Bullettino di bibliografia e
di storia delle scienze mathematiche e fisiche”. Boncompagni was the
editor of the works of Leonardo Pisano (Fibonacci) and was utterly
obsessed with diplomatic (i.e. paleographic) accuracy. He employed a
network of assistants throughout Europe who sent him expertly drawn
facsimiles of historical documents (I have seen some spectacular ones
in archives). He also attempted to reproduce sources in his journal as
authentically as possible, and therefore his printing press eventually
had an formidable collection of cast types at its disposal, for dozens
of scripts, and for countless historical ligatures and abbreviations.
In those days, printing nearly-a-manuscript-facsimile made some sense,
as photographic or even lithographic reproductions were not yet
possible. Yet later generations of scholars made fun of Boncompani's
meticulous diplomatic craze. They would be quite surprised to learn
that in the 21st century, people design digital fonts capable of doing
exactly the kind of things cherished by Boncompagni!
I love it! I'll try to get a look at his stuff.
This [http://openfontlibrary.org/content/psb6m/177/sample.png] is
indeed fascinating and, I find, totally legible (so I assume it
doesn't have 'hlig'?). Fortunately this is not a reproduction of, say,
a 15th-century German scholar's handwriting, which would be per
definitionem totally illegible :)
Still, I cannot refrain from asking: what is exactly the point of such
fonts? Any edition of an historical text should be first and foremost
legible and intelligible to modern readers, without distracting them.
To accurately reproduce an original source, digital color photos do a
far better job, no?
O reason not the need!
One of the nicest things about being an amateur in the Open Source world
is that I don't have to worry about producing a thing that's useful to
enough people to generate a reliable income stream. I cheerfully admit
that I can't think of a lot of practical uses for this font in its
"historical" mode (with hist, hlig and one or two other things switched
on). But I really enjoyed making it.
Now in its default mode it has a number of compromises that make it a
perfectly decent decorative font for various purposes. I use it for
headers in Keynote presentations, and I have a scheme to use it for
chapter heads, subheads and running heads in my current book project.
Peter
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