Junicode
Bold Italic
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Background
Junicode (a contraction of ‘Junius-Unicode’) is an old-style font. The roman is based on early-18th century type used by the Clarendon Press; the italics and bold are designed to match. It contains Greek characters based on the Greek Double Pica cut by Alexander Wilson of Glasgow in the eighteenth century. Specifically, the type is based on that in George Hickes’s “Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium … Thesaurus” (Oxford, 1703-05), which was commissioned by Franciscus Junius.
It makes extensive use of OpenType features; for example, the lowercase ‘f’ or the long ‘s’ are replaced by a version with a shorter top stroke when they would collide with a diacritic on a following letter.
It was originally designed for use by medievalists, and has features, such as insular forms, extensive diacritic support and runes, which are primarily of interest to medieval scholars. However, it is a perfectly usable all-purpose text face, containing general-purpose features such as both lining and old-style numbers, true small capitals, and true subscripts and superscripts.
Junicode is a Unicode version of the original fonts ‘Junius’ and ‘Junius Modern’, both initially released in 1993 as part of an Old English font pack. These used nonstandard encodings, which became an evident problem as their popularity grew. Thus, a Unicode variant was started.
Junicode supports the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.
Early preview releases of Junicode date back to 1996; the 0.1 (roman-only) release is dated 1998. As of 2009, Junicode is still under development; the roman is more complete than the italics or bold, but all are usable for basic work.
Junicode is free software, released under the GNU General Public License.
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