Morgane Pierson The research project Police Pour Les Inscriptions Monétaires (PIM), or Font for Monetary Inscriptions, aims to produce suitable tools for transcribing the information contained in monetary inscriptions beyond their semantic content. Based on the National Library of France collections of antique coins (from France, Italy, Greece, Spain, North Africa and the Middle East), the project request to create fonts to support the following writing systems: Latin, Hebrew, Phoenician, Punic, Cypriot, Archaic Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Paleohispanic, Lycian, Paleo-Hebrew, Kharoshti, Brahmi, and Nabataean. An online text editor has also been devised to typeset them easily and correctly.
These typographic tools are created to be usable in various fields such as numismatic, epigraphy, archaeology, linguistics, and to simplify their use in scientific publications and online catalogs. The multiplicity and diversity of the letters morphologies composing the PIM fonts constitute a unique and fascinating challenge, both in terms of design and of file architecture.
Thus, the PIM project strives to demonstrate how creating custom typographic tools can contribute to the quality of online catalogues and scholarly publications. The attention paid to Unicode encoding and the ergonomics of composition tools guarantees morphological precision, traceability of sources and possibilities of indexing and textual research. This project perfectly illustrates a fertile exchange between theory and practice, which makes it possible to move the research in typography and humanities sciences forward, thus improving access methods and knowledge sharing.
This presentation will first introduce the writing systems tackled in the project, before moving on to explaining the working process at play between archeologists, linguists, developers, and type designers. To conclude, Morgane Pierson will demonstrate some of the possibilities and research opportunities opened up by the innovative typographic tools devised as part of our process.