Download Edlund Insular

Edlund Insular is available for MacOS in both Postscript/Type 1 and TrueType formats.

Download Edlund Insular for MacOS (Postscript/Type 1).

Download Edlund Insular for MacOS (TrueType).

There is only a plain face for Edlund Insular (no bold, italic, or bold-italic faces) and the screen bitmaps are only tuned in the 10-point and 12-point sizes; other point sizes will print normally, but may look odd when displayed on the screen! Still, hopefully this arrangement will meet most needs.

About Edlund Insular

Edlund Insular is designed for use with the Edlund Regular font. It is a serif typeface in which the letterforms are modeled on those used by early medieval scribes in the British Isles, originally developed in Ireland, but later spreading from areas of Celtic influence to become the standard in Anglo-Saxon areas. The Anglo-Saxon variant was later exported to Scandinavia, though in England and Scandinavia this writing style later gave way to Caroline scripts from the European mainland. In Ireland, the old styles continued to develop and their descendants were used in printing into the early part of the 20th century.

Edlund Insular is intended as an early model of a font which can be used to represent medieval manuscripts in a "semi-diplomatic" fashion. That is, an edited version of the manuscript that preserves more features of the original document than is common in standard, normalized, modern editions. Edlund Insular allows the preservation of many medieval features, and can be used to help students become more familiar with medieval writing and languages without the expense of purchasing semi-diplomatic editions or facsimiles of manuscripts.

As a special feature, the upper-case and lower-case thorns [Þ & þ] in Edlund Insular are in an "English" style (Edlund Regular features Icelandic-style thorns). Thus, with careful use of the "Find & Replace" feature found in most word-processing applications, users who so wish may mix these two fonts to spell Old English words with thorns in the Old English style. Likewise, Edlund Insular contains an Anglo-Saxon-style Tironian note which can be used in place of the medieval Scandinavian style Tironian note in the Edlund Regular font.

Edlund Insular contains a variety of other special characters including Old English wynn, ao-ligatures, av-ligatures, several long-s ligatures, ch and ck ligatures, a v-acute, a "tailed z" (sometimes found in Old High German), a "2-shaped r", and a special variant of ash [æ].