Downloading Edlund Fonts
The links on the sidebar at right take you to pages from which you may download the various
available versions of the Edlund fonts. Although designed for use with Mac OS 9.x or earlier, Edlund fonts
seem to work well in OS X. Many people have asked about using Edlund with Windows, and I suggest
trying a font conversion program like
Refont.
I have not tested any Edlund fonts have been tested with this or any other such utility, so your mileage may
vary, to say the least. Let me know how it works!
About the Edlund Font Project
The Edlund Font Project was originally created when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation in the late
1990s using MS Word 5.1 on Mac OS Classic (pre-OS X). I needed a variety
of glyphs that were either inaccessible or simply did not then exist in any standard MacRoman-compatible
font (to be fair, I needed some glyphs that did not then exist in any PC font either).
Rather than simply hack existing fonts, I created my own typeface, Edlund, from scratch partially to
ensure a consistent look, but mostly to ensure I didn't violate the copyrights on any existing
fonts :) Therefore, everything in the Edlund font family can be made freely available to
all students and scholars, and the Edlund Font Project pages exist to provide scholars of medieval Northwestern
Europe's history, languages, and cultures with good quality fonts containing the special characters their
scholarship requires.
Although designed for use with Mac OS 9.x or earlier, Edlund fonts seem to work well in
OS X. The links on the sidebar at right take you to pages from which you may download the various
available versions of the Edlund fonts. Many people have asked about using Edlund with Windows, and I suggest
trying a font conversion program like
Refont.
I have not tested any Edlund fonts have been tested with this or any other such utility, so your mileage may
vary, to say the least. Let me know how it works!
I am quite proud to say that Edlund typefaces have been used in a number professional publications,
including Religion & Literature from the University of Notre Dame
and Icelandic Histories and Romances by Ralph O'Connor (blatant plug --> which can be had from
Amazon.co.uk
or Amazon.com).
Edlund fonts were also mentioned in an article about outstanding shareware fonts in Step-by-Step Electronic Design Newsletter
(an award-winning newsletter for desktop-publishing designers).
About the Edlund Fonts
Edlund is more or less an Old Style typeface, and a variety of such typefaces served as inspiration and models in Edlund's creation, including Sabon, Garamond, Baskerville, Palatino, and Times. Also, great inspiration was provided by the excellent Junius font family, constructed by Peter Baker. The original prototype of the Edlund font was done by Darcy Burner using Fontographer 3.1. Substantial alteration and expansion was done by Carl Anderson with Fontographer 4.0, with notable assistance from well-known pro fontdude Gary Munch.
The Future?
Since completing my Ph.D. program in 2000, I have not really been able to justify spending a lot of time
on designing academic fonts (fun though that would be). Besides, despite showing their age a bit,
the Edlund fonts have been working pretty well as they are :) I have recently downloaded
the very cool-looking Pfaedit software, which is open source
and seems to run happily enough under X11 on OS X; I may get a chance to play with it eventually ...
but at present, I have no real plans to complete work on some of the additions to the Edlund font family suite
on which I had been working or to make the Edlund fonts Unicode compliant (though it would be pretty cool to
do that someday, and if anyone else wants to, go ahead! :) There are, however, a number of academic font
designers working on such projects, and happily OS X will work with fonts designed for Windows,
giving us users a lot more options than in the old days. I suggest checking out:
I had been prototyping various rune fonts (Viking/Medieval Scandinavian and Common Germanic,
mostly) that would harmonize with Edlund, but sadly this project has also ended up rusting on a siding.
Nevertheless, people are making some cool Unicode rune fonts these days:
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