The pro version of the font was created by Edward C. D. Hopkins in 2017. Numismatica Pro is based on the work of several font designers who have permitted incorporation of their work. The baseline Latin, Greek and Cyrillic character sets are from the BPreplay font by George Triantafyllakos. Several monogram glyphs were borrowed from the series of Seleucid monogram fonts designed by Catharine Lorber and from fonts designed by Brad Nelson of Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. Additional monograms were contributed by Dr. Farhad Assar of Oxford, England. The majority of monograms I drew by hand based on photos of actual Parthian coins. The many variations of archaic and ancient Greek letterforms were adapted from my earlier Numismatica symbol font and are consistent with their use in Dave Perry’s Cardo font. The Numismatica Pro font was created in support of the Sylloge Nummorum Parthicorum project.
The literature includes documentation of many numismatic letterforms. B.V. Head, Historia Numorum (1911), summarized the Greek and Latin characters used on coins and provided the baseline for most later scholars. A study of Sayle's alphabet chart, a synthesis of Head, shows approximately 173 characters are needed to represent this chart if they are considered in alpha-sort groups. Icard has few variances with Head. Olson and Mitchiner add eastern forms. Many of the characters required for numismatic description of ancient coins are not found in the Unicode 12.0 specification.
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The Unicode standard contains only one instance of each character and assigns it a unique name and code value. Special codes are provided for multiple variants of a character, and a "Private Use Area" is set aside for proprietary use. Because a single Greek letter letter may have numerous different letterforms, or glyphs, it is necessary to store these variant glyphs in Unicode's Private Use Area. Drawing on the above documents and expert advice, I defined a glyph chart for a Greek numismatic font. Unicode, and some specialty computer programs and operating systems, require distinctive names for the letterforms. In addition to the Greek characters found on ancient coins, special punctuation and symbols are necessary to describe coins, many of which are not in Unicode.
Drawing on the above and other sources, I prepared the following two charts to illustrate the glyphs used to describe Greek letters used on ancient coins and their descriptive names. All the below glyphs are contained in the Numismatica Pro Font.
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This page last updated 23 Feb 2021