a typeface by Feòrag

Vespasian is an uncial typeface based on lettering from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript produced at St. Augustine's, Canterbury, in the second quarter of the 8th century. The letters K, W and Y come from George Bain's version of the script shown in his Celtic Art - the Methods of Construction. The ampersand is a 7th century one illustrated by Lewis Day. The Greek characters are based on those found in Greek uncials of the same period.

Version 3 is now an OpenType font using Unicode, with support for most languages using Roman characters, plus Greek. If you do not have the specific keyboard layout installed, they can be found using the Glyphs/Special Characters menu item in most MacOS X applications. A bold version has also been added, and the whole design has been cleaned up and made more regular.

The image below gives a sample of some of the characters included in the font:

The typeface comes in two 'flavours'. The OTF version is PostScript-flavoured OpenType; the TTF is TrueType-flavoured OpenType. Both should work on MacOS X, Linux and Windows systems. If you use MacOS 8 or 9, only the OTF version will work on these systems. If you have a PostScript printer, you should also choose the OTF version.

This typeface is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland.

Note that the license includes the provision Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. You already have my permission to use this font for commercial purposes, such as in a magazine or advertising, and do not need to ask (though a copy of whatever you used it for would be nice). There is also no need to credit me when using the typeface in this way. If you wish to redistribute this font commercially, including on a website with paid-for advertising, you must still get my permission to do so and you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Download OTF version 3.1 [Zip 100 Kb]
Download TTF version 3.1 [Zip 132 Kb]