Secretary Hand - the Joscelyn font!

Every so often, something comes along that just makes me laugh for its sheer brilliance and simplicity. This is one such occasion - a font that writes in a style of Secretary Hand!

To be slightly more correct, there is a font available for your word processing software called Joscelyn. I noticed it being tweeted about earlier on the Manuscripts After Print account (@MSS_AfterPrint), which was retweeted by a reader (sorry, have lost who that was, but you are a hero!). The font attempts to render text in an old European style of handwriting known as Secretary Hand, which in Scotland was well used up to the 18th century, and which can cause a great number of headaches with earlier documents.

This is an example of the font's style...

The phrase written here is "This is some craic, so it is....!!!" (Ulster English and Secretary Hand, together at last!)

The Scottish Handwriting website (www.scottishhandwriting.com) suggests that a useful practice phrase to write down in Scots, using Secretary Hand, is 'sic braw secretarie hand'. This is that phrase from the site, with Joscelyn's rendition of it placed below:

You'll notice some differences - it's... complicated! But you'll find more about it on the website.

Whether the font can help you attune to the forms of Secretary Hand script or not, it is still immense fun to have something a bit Oldie Wordie on my computer!

The tweet noted more about the font earlier:

We've been having loads of fun with Joscelyn, an amazing secretary hand font developed by the incredibly talented Peter Baker. It's based on the main hand of Corpus Christi College MS 488 and is freely available at https://github.com/psb1558/Joscelyn-font/releases. Check out those ligatures!

Following the link takes you to a page where you can download a zipped folder called Joscelyn.zip. Save this, then extract the files. Once done, simply right click on Joscelyn.otf and click on install.
 
With thanks to all involved!

Chris

You can pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 (out April). Also available, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.