AJ Quadrata is an authentic revival of the textura quadrata hand, and its major inspiration is a 15th-century Latin manuscript of the Bible from Zwolle, the Netherlands. The typeface is delivered in two flavors.
The default cut is a modern take on textura quadrata that can be useful for today and tomorrow. The standard ligatures feature employs nearly all letters. The tittle of i retains its original, hasty squiggle form (except for the Turkish localization). Discretionary ligatures include medieval ligatures da, de, do, pa, pe, po (and their mixed-case counterparts!). Stylistic sets allow to use historic letter variants such as long s and rotunda r, closed-counter a, and alternate capitals.
AJ Quadrata Medieval is perfect for setting medieval Latin. Default forms of capital F, H and O are swapped with the alternates. The squiggles above i only appear for disamibiguation nearby m, n or u, as in original manuscripts. Discretionary ligatures and historic variants are promoted to the standard ligatures feature to make room in the discretionary ligatures feature for a variety of scribal abbreviations. Dedicated stylistic sets include medieval punctuation and justification alternates - glyphs with elongated terminals used for lengthening lines that end up too short.
The Rubrum styles can be layered and colored to create the illuminated effect on the capital letters.
Besides a faithful rendition of extended Latin including Vietnamese, numerous synthetic additions are included: polytonic Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic (with Bulgarian and Serbian/Macedonian localizations).
Both flavors of the typeface can be considered a starting point that can be further customized using OpenType features, including Stylistic Sets (some features differ between AJ Quadrata and AJ Quadrata Medieval):
ss01 Alt Ess02 Descending F / Roman Fss03 Uncial H / Roman Hss04 Angular O / Round Oss05 Contextual closed-counter ass06 Diamond-dot i j / Always dotted i, jss07 Contextual rotunda r / No r rotundass08 Contextual long s / No long sss09 Dotless yss10 Serbian Cyrillicss11 Alt Cyrillic dess12 Alt Cyrillic zhess13 Alt Cyrillic shass14-ss17 [reserved for future use]ss18 Scribal punctuationss19 Alt linking hyphenss20 Justification alternates
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