Kalvesmaki / Shaner project description
Joel Kalvesmaki and Lynne Shaner write:
Dumbarton Oaks is planning a new, comprehensive OpenType font appropriate for inscriptions in the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets. The new font, Athena Ruby (named in part after the late Glenn Ruby, publications manager at Dumbarton Oaks, 1980-2004), will be freely available to scholars. It will include all the characters found in the several seal and coin fonts we have already developed (such as the one known to many epigraphers as Athena), and it will introduce new letterforms, ligatures, punctuation marks, and decorations. The font will be professionally designed: all characters will be consistently drawn and kerned, and expanded OpenType conventions will be used.
We intend Athena Ruby to be Unicode compliant. Where there are unique characters that do not, but should, have a Unicode assignment, we will write proposals to the Unicode Consortium for their inclusion. We also intend to take advantage of the OpenType technology that allows variant glyphs--important to sigillographers and numismatists for dating purposes--to be displayed when requested, without compromising the underlying data. (For instance, should a sigillographer need to note in a particular seal that one alpha has a broken crossbar and another is looped, both alphas would appear on screen in their unique letterforms, and both would show up in any searches for alphas.)
Dumbarton Oaks would like to see Epidoc developed to allow users tag epigraphic texts for variant letterforms, ligatures, and so forth. We would like to see sigillographers, numismatists, and other epigraphers help establish standards, so interchangeable fonts can be developed (and not just by Dumbarton Oaks).