Dynamic Diacritics
A custom typeface enables a publisher to take control of typography in a way that isn’t possible with off-the-shelf fonts. A principal benefit is the harmonisation of text across multiple languages, books, and series, contributing to a recognisable ‘Brill’ look and feel. Founded in the 17th Century, Brill is an esteemed Dutch publishing house with a rich history and strong international focus. Since the 17th Century, Brill has championed the mutuality of scholarship and typography—the focus of its 330th anniversary celebrations in 2012—, but initial adaptation to digital technology had sometimes resulted in compromises in quality and much inconsistency across titles. The company issues hundreds of books and journals every year in a variety of academic fields, involving a broad range of scholarly and multilingual texts, making it difficult to manage a consistent typographic style or production workflow with ad hoc combinations of off-the-shelf fonts. A custom font solution was eventually recognised as the only way to restore and take forward Brill’s legacy of scholarship and typography.
Work commenced on the Brill types in 2008, and the first version was put into use by Brill and made available to scholars under a no-fee, non-commercial use license six years later. The types were designed by John Hudson, with Alice Savoie doing much of the work on the bold weights, and Karsten Luecke contributing the fraktur alphabet for use in textual apparatus. Between 2021 and 2024, versions 4.00 and 5.00 of the Brill types were completed with assistance from Paul Hanslow and Kaja Słojewska, adding more than 1,200 glyphs per font. Each of Brill’s four styles (regular, italic, bold, and bold italic) includes approximately 7,000 glyphs, covering Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin, with the full range of diacritic and linguistic characters required to transcribe text in any language from any period, letters of historical orthographies, many symbols, and extensive typographic variants such as smallcaps, ligating forms, and multiple numeral forms. In addition to the complete fonts recommended for academic users, subset products for modern languages in Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts are also available (please check product contents below to determine the appropriate fonts for your needs). As the colourful samples presented here demonstrate, suitable uses for the Brill types are not limited to scholarly publications or those for which involve the more esoteric aspects of the complete character set. §
The Brill Design
I n a typeface for such a wide range of languages and texts, the core design characteristics need to accommodate more variety of shapes than a typical Latin typeface for modern European languages. Important areas of Brill’s publishing programme involve extensive use of reversed, rotated or symmetrical shapes that occur in the International Phonetic Association alphabet and as a feature of some Cyrillic letters. This consideration established the design genre of the Brill types, with their near vertical contrast axis and expansion stroke modulation based on the dynamics of a flexible, pointed nib. There is an inherent stability in this style that makes it more easily adaptable to a wide variety of shapes than, for instance, renaissance style types with a more dynamic oblique axis and broad-nib modulation patterns.
The Brill types were recognised in the 2013 Type Directors Club competition where Font Bureau founder David Berlow picked it as his Judge’s Choice, stating ‘I had to stare at it quietly for a while to figure out what was included, because it’s all so pleasantly integrated. From the fraktur to the € to 16/32, roman and italic, old and new, simple and complex, whatever a writer would need to publish a good book for reading.’ Behind its calm visual design, Brill has the rare technical ability to legibly display any combination of the supported characters that might be encountered in text, including sequences of combining diacritic marks above and below letters. The OpenType Layout programming in the fonts includes smart contextual rules affecting the shape, spacing, and mark positioning of characters. Users are able to throw pretty much any text at these fonts and get back a legible and aesthetically pleasing display.
In addition to using these fonts in their own publications and making them available at no fee for non-commercial use, Brill has now granted Tiro Typeworks the right to license them to other publishers and designers. In this way, the Brill types disseminate even more widely that mutuality of scholarship and typography that began in Leiden more than 330 years ago.
The Brill Products
Brill
The Brill complete fonts include all the glyphs and features used by Brill publishers in their scholarly books and journals. Each font contains approximately 7,000 glyphs, supporting more than 2,800 characters in a variety of stylistic and contextual variants. In addition to support for large numbers of modern language orthographies, the complete Brill fonts include IPA, Uralicist, and other phonetic notation alphabets, extensive technical, cultural, and textual apparatus symbols, a full complement of combining marks, and rare historical characters such as archaic Greek letters and acrophonic numbers, Old Cyrillic letters, and mediaeval palaeographic characters.
Brill Cyrillic
The Brill Cyrillic subset fonts include all the characters and stylistic and contextual glyphs needed for modern language Cyrillic script orthographies supported by the Brill types, which includes all Slavic languages as well as some of the major Central Asian Turkic languages. They do not include all extended Cyrillic characters, which are not currently supported in Brill publishing, and do not include the Old Cyrillic characters that are available only in the complete fonts. The Cyrillic fonts include a basic Latin A–z subset.
Brill Greek
The Brill Greek subset fonts include all the characters and stylistic and contextual glyphs needed for modern language Greek script orthographies supported by the Brill types, in both the simplified monotonic system and the traditional polytonic system. They do not include archaic letters or acrophonic numbers, which are available only in the complete fonts. The Greek fonts include a basic Latin A–z subset.
Brill Latin
The Brill Latin subset fonts include all the characters and stylistic and contextual glyphs needed for modern language Latin script orthographies supported by the Brill types. This includes both precomposed diacritic characters as well as the same flexible system of combining mark positioning as in the complete fonts. They do not include phonetic notation characters except those that also occur in natural language orthographies, and do not support historical characters not in modern use.
