a typeface by Feòrag

Many years ago, I made Vespasian, an uncial typeface based on George Bain’s version of the lettering from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript produced at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, in the second quarter of the 8th century. Now the manuscript is online, so I had a look and discovered it to be quite different from Bain’s interpretation. And the inevitable happened.

This is an OpenType font using Unicode, with support for most languages using Roman characters, including Vietnamese. Features include initial forms, and some variant characters in ss01. There is a basic uppercase Greek alphabet (the K is based on kappa), and small caps, based on another hand in the same manuscript.

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 the SIL Open Font License 1.1

While the font is free for you to use and adapt, with very few conditions attached, if you do use it and enjoy it, a small donation would be appreciated. Any money so received will be ring-fenced for spending on font software, books etc. Copies of anything on which it's used would be nice, too.

Note that the license restricts the distribution of fonts outside a software package. To make it clear, if I have personally submitted this to your font archive, then you have my permission to distribute this font, though the bundle of font and documents must stay together.

Download OTF version 1.0 [Zip 615 Kb]
Download TTF version 1.0 [Zip 620 Kb]