Blackletter style for textual apparatus

Posted by: John Hudson

I am down to the last couple of dozen glyphs that need to be drawn and hinted to round out the character sets for the SBL Greek and SBL BibLit fonts (as well as for a new version of the SBL Hebrew). Some of these are common to all three fonts, and desirable to be able to claim specific codepage compatibility coverage for Windows and Mac operating systems (e.g. currency symbols).

In addition to these common glyphs. The SBL BibLit font will contain a subset of Germanic blackletter letters (mapped to symbol and maths Unicode characters) for use in textual apparatus. Eventually, it would be good to support a complete upper and lowercase set in this style, but that is akin to designing a whole new typeface, so I have identified a subset of letters based on review of a number of major critical editions in the field of Biblical Studies (BHS, Nestle-Aland, DBG Vulgate):

Afraktur      u1D504
Adieresisfraktur   u1D5040308
Bfraktur      u1D505
Cfraktur      uni212D
Cfraktur_commaabovecomb   uni212D0313
Gfraktur      u1D50A
Hfraktur      uni210C
Kfraktur      u1D50E
Lfraktur      u1D50F
Mfraktur      u1D510
Pfraktur      u1D513
Qfraktur      u1D514
Rfraktur      u1D515
Sfraktur      u1D516
Tfraktur      u1D517
Vfraktur      u1D519
Wfraktur      u1D51A
bfraktur      u1D587
cfraktur      u1D588
dfraktur      u1D589
hfraktur      u1D58D
pfraktur      u1D52D
ofraktur      u1D594
rfraktur      u1D597
sfraktur      u1D598
vfraktur      u1D59B
wfraktur      u1D59C

The question I'm considering now is the specific style of blackletter that should be used in the SBL BibLit font. The glyph names used in development, based on the Unicode character names, say 'fraktur', but this is presumably because this style is most commonly used in the context of mathematical typesetting, and the term is often (mistakenly) used as a synonym for blackletter. I have begun designing these glyphs as a schwabacher, since this is the style used in the textual apparatus of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, with which I began. I think this style works well for most purposes, and will be welcome in familiarity to students of the BHS; however, other editions I have looked at use different styles, and there are some letterforms, notably the uppercase H, which do not occur in BHS but do in other texts, and which are hard for readers unfamiliar with the schwabacher style to identify.

I'm wondering if there is a particular style that is preferred by SBL font users, especially those involved in publishing?

One option I have been considering is a kind of simplified schwabacher in which letters such as H do not follow the typical form of the style, but are designed to be more easily identifiable to readers unfamiliar with some of the idiosyncrasies of Germanic chirography.

Any thoughts?