The Cardo Font

 

 

NEWS ABOUT CARDO

5/25/10       version .99 of Cardo is posted.  This is mainly an update for the license information, as explained on the main page of this site, although a couple of small items are also fixed.  The manual is still at version .98; ignore the license information contained in it.

11/02/04     version .98 of Cardo has been released!  This is a major upgrade, over two years in the making, with over 1,400 new characters.  The most significant additions are all the Greek characters proposed for Unicode by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the characters recommended by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.  For the first time Cardo contains characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode and provides OpenType tables to access alternate glyphs.  See below for complete details about what has been added or improved in this release.  Also, from now on, the manual will be available only in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format; there used to be a Word version as well, but it’s better to standardize on one cross-platform format.  There are also new test documents for users of Adobe InDesign and Mellel.

 

Note: links to download the font are found at the bottom of this page, as is a more detailed update history.

 

 

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT CARDO

Cardo is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.  Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters.  It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.

 

Cardo is freely available (subject to the terms of use below).  I do have one request: if you find Cardo useful, or if you have suggestions for improvement, please email me and tell me about what you are doing with the font.  Knowing that people are using Cardo makes the time and effort I put into it worthwhile.

 

ORIGIN & DESIGN

This font is my version of a typeface cut for the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and first used to print Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna.  This font has been revived in modern times under several names (Bembo, Aetna, Aldine 401).  I chose it mainly because it is a classic book face, suitable for scholarship, and also because it is easier to get various diacritics sized and positioned for legibility with this design than with some others.  I added a set of Greek characters designed to harmonize well on the page with the Roman letters as well as many other characters useful to scholars.  The Hebrew characters are designed to match those used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as closely as possible and so have no claim to originality.

 

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

This is a large Unicode font.

 

For Windows, you need at least Windows 95 and a word processor that can handle Unicode-based documents: either Microsoft Word 97 or more recent, or OpenOffice 1.0 or greater.  (For more information about OpenOffice, a full-featured, open-source suite comparable to Microsoft Office that is attacting considerable interest these days, click this link; note however that Open Office does not yet handle characters in the supplementary planes.)  You will also need a way to enter the Unicode characters; either Word’s Insert/Symbol, a Unicode editor such as UniPad (plain text only), or my own keyboard utility.  If you want to use Hebrew in true right-to-left fashion, you must have Word 2000 or XP running under Windows 2000 or XP; OpenOffice does not yet handle right-to-left scripts.

 

On the Mac, you need OS X plus a Unicode-aware editor or keyboard utility.  Mac Word 2004 handles Unicode well; Word 2001 and Office X do not.  OpenOffice for OS X works well with Unicode, although it does not yet have the standard Mac interface; you need to use the X11 windowing system.  Mellel, a word processor for OS 10.2 or later, is very affordable and handles Unicode and RTL text nicely; it is also the first Mac word processor to support OpenType features.  Nisus has developed a new version of Writer, claimed to be Unicode-ca­pable, but I have not tried it yet.  You can also use Apple’s TextEdit (installed as part of a default OS X installation).  If you are using an editor or word processor that is designed for Unicode, you can use the Unicode Hex entry method or the Extended Roman keyboard.

 

For Unix/Linux systems: Cardo has been extensively tested on Mandrake 10.1 (with the 2.6.9 kernel and Kde 2.3.2).  I have also had some other reports of success on Linux but do not have details.

 

If you are not clear about what all this means, see my booklet about word processing issues for scholars, which provides a good introduction to Unicode and other font issues.

 

 

FEATURES OF THE CURRENT RELEASE

Cardo is still a work in progress; there are a number of characters I want to add, and there are undoubtedly bugs that will surface.  Previous versions were described as beta releases, which lead some people to think that Cardo was not a good, usable font.  Therefore, in recognition of the large number of new characters and the length of time that Cardo has been in development, I have decided to call the current release version 1.0.

 

Compared to the previous release (.71), version .98 has the following new characters:

 

See below for a complete update history.

 

COVERAGE

The following Unicode ranges are included (complete coverage unless otherwise noted):

 

There are also many additional Unicode characters that are useful for scholars, such as double brackets, angle brackets, etc. that come from different areas of Unicode.

 

Cardo also contains the following glyphs in the Private Use Area (i.e., they are not a part of the Unicode standard but may be useful to scholars or to those who want high-quality typography):

 

IN THE PIPELINE

Characters planned for future releases of Cardo include the following:

 

 

LIMITATIONS

Cardo is still a work in progress.  The character design and repertoire are not absolutely final.  Please send me any comments that you have so that I can improve future versions.  Also, I have not yet done hand hinting of the characters.  This means that on most systems the characters will print better than they will look on the screen.  On screen at text sizes some stems will look uneven and so forth.  A future release will have better hinting.

 

On rare occasions in Hebrew one needs to use two cantillation marks over a single base character.  As of August 2004, this is not possible in Windows; this is a problem with Windows, not with Cardo.  Microsoft is aware of this and will fix the problem in a future release of Windows.

 

Word 2000 running under Win2000 does not like the Hebrew characters in Cardo .56.  If you try to use them it substitutes Times New Roman.  I don’t know why; they work fine in WordPad under Win2000 as well as in Word XP with either WordPad or Word 2002 (aka Word XP).  Adobe InDesign Middle Eastern version on Mac OS X does not like Cardo at all (western versions are OK).

 

CARDO ON MAC OS 8 AND 9

In response to some requests, I made a version of Cardo for Mac OS 8/9.  It never worked very well and as of April 2003 it is no longer available.  The unfortunate truth is that Unicode support under pre-OS X systems is tricky and not terribly useful in any case since there are very few applications that support it.  My limited time is better used to support newer systems on which Cardo can work well and to add the many characters that are in the pipeline.

 

TERMS OF USE

OFLLogoRectColorCardo has now been released under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1.  The text of the license appears below; click the graphic at the left for additional information about this license.

 

Copyright (c) 2004–2010, David J. Perry, with Reserved Font Name Cardo.

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

 

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SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007

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PREAMBLE

The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide development of collaborative font projects, to support the font creation efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide a free and open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership with others.

 

The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives.

 

DEFINITIONS

"Font Software" refers to the set of files released by the Copyright Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may include source files, build scripts and documentation.

 

"Reserved Font Name" refers to any names specified as such after the copyright statement(s).

 

"Original Version" refers to the collection of Font Software components as distributed by the Copyright Holder(s).

 

"Modified Version" refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting, or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a new environment.

 

"Author" refers to any designer, engineer, programmer, technical writer or other person who contributed to the Font Software.

 

PERMISSION & CONDITIONS

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font Software, subject to the following conditions:

 

1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.

 

2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.

 

3) No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding Copyright Holder. This restriction only applies to the primary font name as presented to the users.

 

4) The name(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) or the Author(s) of the Font Software shall not be used to promote, endorse or advertise any Modified Version, except to acknowledge the contribution(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) and the Author(s) or with their explicit written permission.

 

5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole, must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software.

 

TERMINATION

This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are not met.

 

DISCLAIMER

THE FONT SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF COPYRIGHT, PATENT, TRADEMARK, OR OTHER RIGHT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE FONT SOFTWARE OR FROM OTHER DEALINGS IN THE FONT SOFTWARE.

 

 

HOW TO DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL

The file cardo99.zip contains the Windows/OS X TrueType font plus a readme file with installation instructions. It also contains a user’s manual in PDF format.  The manual gives additional information about the design of the font and will let you view all the characters included in the font after you install it in your system.  On my Windows system, the manual looks much better with Adobe Reader 6 (fonts are noticeably smoother), although it is entirely legible under Reader 5.  Go to this page to update your version of Adobe Reader.  For those who may want them for some reason, I have left the earlier versions here: cardo98.zip, cardo71.zip and cardo56.zip .

 

For those who want to test the OpenType features such as stylistic alternates, there are two test documents available to download: an Adobe InDesign file (zipped) and a Mellel file (binhex).  The InDesign file requires InDesign 2.0 or later.  (It does not work with the Middle Eastern Mac InDesign.)  For Mellel, you need 1.8.1 or more recent.

 

Downloading and installing the font indicates your acceptance of the terms of use, which are given above as well as in the user’s manual.  Right-click on a blue link in the previous paragraphs and save the zip file to your computer.  Open it with any of the usual unzip utilities and install the font as you would any TrueType font.  See the readme file if you aren’t sure how to install fonts. 

 

Note to Mac folks: recent versions of StuffIt Expander can open .zip files as well as .sit files, so try just downloading from the link above.  If anybody really needs a .sit archive, email me and I will post one.

 

 

UPDATE HISTORY

5/25/10          version .99 of Cardo posted

11/06/04        version .98 of Cardo posted; see above for list of new features.

4/5/03           Mac OS 8/9 version no longer available

11/18/02        an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Cardo manual is now available.  This will be particularly useful for Mac and Linux users, or Windows users who don’t have Microsoft Word.

8/27/02         version .71 of Cardo posted.  This adds the complete block of Unicode combining marks  to the Windows/OS X version (only selected marks were found in previous versions).  Cardo now includes OpenType support for Hebrew.

8/23/02         Mac OS 8/9 version of Cardo posted

8/20/02:        version .70 posted.  This is a minor upgrade that adds a few Unicode space and formatting characters and fixes one bug in the Hebrew OT tables.

8/13/02:        version .59 which fixed a bug in v. 58  and which may provide better-looking outlines on some systems.  In terms of characters and features, this is the same as version .58.

7/28/02:        an italic version of Cardo is in the works!  Several users have asked for this. It will make Cardo much more useful for academics, who require italic for book titles and so forth.

7/28/02:        first version (.58) with OpenType support for Hebrew and OpenType tables for advanced Latin typography

4/26/02:        first version of Cardo (.56) that includes Hebrew characters posted

 

 

Last updated November 18, 2004

 

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