I was wondering if it would be possible to be more accurate with recording... special characters on coins.
I did a few glyphs to extend the Source Pro Font of Numista, to illustrate why I think this would be useful:
- alternative glyph styles and punctuation:
would also be useful here for example
- unusual typographic ligatures:
- monograms:
There is a nice project here but it seems to be defunct and this is much more than we need I think. I don't imagine that we should record every single type of serif on every coin, but rather just major topological differences like this A:
, keeping the simple "sans serif" style as much as possible. Sometimes it is possible to "approximate" like for this "n":
But then it looks messy. Like on this coin, which has this legend:
ΑΝΤWΝΙΟC ΓΟΡΔΙΑΝΟC ΑVΓ
And because it combines glyphs from different type sets (Greek, Latin), then they are all different sizes.
Also ideally these characters should still be "searchable". If I replace an "A" with "Λ" (Greek Lambda) to reflect the style, like on this coin, I won't be able to find it if I search for "CONRADIA", because the legend is "COnRΛDIΛ". With an open type font, it is possible to make all alternative glyphs searchable.
Finally, I only talk about Greek/Latin/Cyrillic script. With all the other scripts... I would not really know where to start.
So do we need a Numista Font? Any ideas, thoughts, and feedback welcome!
strato
