Introducing Athena Ruby, Dumbarton Oaks’ New Font for Byzantine Inscriptions

Abstract

Dumbarton Oaks has created Athena Ruby, a comprehensive Open Type font for the scholarly publication of Byzantine inscriptions. The font takes advantage of newly emergent standards for digital publishing. This article offers a panoramic view of the letterforms, symbols, and punctuation, and provides an example of how the font may be used to publish inscriptions. In the typical edition of an inscription, the transcription is frequently peppered with brackets, parentheses, punctuation, word spaces, and so forth, to render the text intelligible and to distinguish in the synthesis what is seen from what the editor wishes to restore. Such transcriptions are frequently preceded by a version of the text that shows the appearance of the original. For unica, this visual record is rendered by a photograph or a line drawing. But for inscriptions that are repeated-perhaps they were mass-produced or an artist traveled in an area-the visual rendering is difficult or impossible to commit to a photograph. Abrasion, corrosion, and other problems in an inscribed object can make photographs impossible to read accurately. Some items, such as coins and seals, cluster around a typological ideal, and the drawing or photograph of any individual object would not convey the ideal specimen. Such difficulties have led epigraphers-particularly numismatists and sigillographers-to provide a preliminary, visual transcription to stand between the photograph or drawing and the critically edited transcription. This visual transcription normally shows the ideal form of the special letterforms, ligatures, decorations, and so on. These customized glyphs do not presume to replace photographs or drawings. Rather they allow a scholar to interpret his or her materials, to present the letterforms with a regulated variety, and to convey some reasons for classifying and dating the object. In the age of print, it was expensive, but technologically easy, to accommodate epigraphers' typographical needs. Hot lead is conducive to inventive letterforms, designs, and glyphs. A print house merely had to have on staff someone who could carve new glyphs. For example, some of the catalogues Dumbarton Oaks published in the 1950s and 1960s were executed by German typesetters, who replicated the letterforms that scholars meticulously drew (see fig. 1). 1 Such books are beautiful to see and touch. The designs, usually executed by a single typographer, are consistently harmonious, not just internally but also with the Latin alphabet used elsewhere in the book. Tracing the page with a finger, the reader feels the designs, raised through the letterpress printing process. The catalogues, like their subjects, are objets d'art.