Ancient Typeface Recreation

Photo Credit: Cambridge University Library

Team

Prof Sacha Stern - Professor of Rabbinic Judaism and Head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL

Jay Birbeck - Graphic Designer and Digital Humanities MSc Graduate, UCL

The Brief

Deep within Ciaro's Ben Ezra Synagogue, in a hidden storeroom called a Genizah, scholars in the late 18th century uncovered more than 300,000 manuscript fragments. These fragments were mainly written in Hebrew, Arabic and detail around 1,000-years (870 CE to 19th century) of Jewish, Middle-Eastern and North African history. They are the largest collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. However, many of these fragments were damaged and have since been lost.

In the summer of 2018, I teamed up with Sacha Stern (DPhil. Oxon. 1992) to help digitally recreate some of the lost fragments, which were to be printed in his new book: The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921/2 CE (Leiden 2019).

The Fragments

The specific fragments I created were evidenced by Israel Lévi, chief rabbi of France and scholar, at the great exhibition of Paris in 1900, who saw them at the stall of a merchant from Cairo. Lévi copied out the text and promptly published it, but without saying what happened to the fragments. They may have remained in the hands of the merchant, or they may have been sold. Sacha Stern searched for them in vain, in Paris and elsewhere; the assumption must be that they are lost. All that we have of them now is Lévi’s edition.

Remarkably, Stern was able to identify two surviving fragments that matched what Lévi had written down in 1990. It was from this basis that we could begin to build the virtual fragments.

Identifying the Type Source

The first step was to create a Hebrew alphabet using samples from the surviving manuscripts. Because of significant variations in the handwriting, a decision had to be taken as to which samples in the manuscript to choose for each letter of the alphabet. In the absence of objective criteria, the decision had to be somewhat arbitrary. We avoided using characters that appeared unrepresentative or unusual in the manuscript in terms of dimensions, shape, and internal proportions.

Photo Credit: Cambridge University Library T-S N 98.18

Vectorising the Type Source

To extract the graphemes from images of the manuscript, I used a method called thresholding, which generates binary images consisting of black and white pixels only. To smooth out the edges, I converted the graphemes into vector shapes. This made them more malleable than pixilated images.

I then then used Fontself Maker extension for Illustrator to assign the shapes to the relevant unicode.

Placing the Text

One of our main challenges was deciding the text layout. Our guiding principle was to ignore Lévi’s edition, whose alignment was clearly not authentic, and instead to imitate the layout and spacing of the extant manuscript.

Adding Realism

To enhance the realism of the images, I created a simulated paper background. Additionally, I altered the kerning, width, height and letter spacing of many graphemes to simulate the variation inherent to handwritten text. This task, which effectively compensated for our decision to use a single sample for each letter of the alphabet, was particularly labour intensive.