https://github.com/psb1558/Junicode-font/discussions/205#discussion-5432527
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I’d like to thank all who’ve submitted issues over the past couple of weeks. Your contributions have made an enormous difference in the quality of the font. As we approach the release of Junicode 2, I’d also like to beg for more checking and more issues, because I can’t give the font a comprehensive review myself.
By way of explanation, here are a few stats. Between the roman and the italic faces, the font contains 10,180 glyphs. Each glyph is interpolated from six masters—so the font’s source consists of 61,080 masters. There is a roughly similar number of kerning pairs. All of the masters and kerning pairs should be checked, because a small, barely visible error in a single master or kerning pair can trigger an all-too visible error in one or more of the font’s instances. Speaking of instances, the static version of the font consists of 38 files containing a total of 193,470 glyphs, each of which should be checked.
How did the font get so big, when it is the creation of just one person? The answers are, first, that it has been in development for over thirty years (340-odd glyphs per year is not so bad, even for a spare-time project), and, second, that it has always been responsive to requests from users, including medievalists (of course), classicists, linguists of every stripe, and scholars in many more fields requiring the kind of font support that commercial products don’t typically offer because there’s little or no money in it.
I recently tried to estimate the number of Junicode users, but discovered that it couldn’t be done, except by checking font sites that offer download stats. I stopped counting somewhere between 450,000 and 500,000—and of course I had no way of counting people who’ve downloaded it in TeXLive, or various Linux distributions, or Homebrew. The total number of downloads must be well over a million, and even if only a fraction of those represent active users, still the number of users is probably pretty large for a font of this kind, mainly aiming to serve a scholarly audience.
I have received almost nothing by way of compensation for my work on Junicode. Once someone donated, I think, $25 via a button on my old SourceForge page, and another time a fellow-medievalist at a conference bought me a beer because, he said, “You made Junicode.” The kind of compensation I would like most is engagement—for some fraction of Junicode’s user base to download the beta of Junicode 2 (currently version 1.067, but I am posting a new version every couple of days), set one of their favorite texts in it, and examine it for problems: faulty letter-shapes, bad spacing, glitches in OpenType features, etc.
Because I can’t do it all by myself.
Many thanks.
(Feel free to share this if you know of any place where it might reach Junicode users.)
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Pozdrawiam
JSB
P.S. O foncie pisałem m.in. w notatce
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368455744_Parkosz_Unicode_i_Junico…
- preprint dostępny na życzenie, w druku w Poradniku Językowym.
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,
Janusz S. Bien
emeryt (emeritus)
https://sites.google.com/view/jsbien
