Create a specialized font with V/U allograph

[geealbers]

The title of the CVA series is traditionally set using V in place of U: CORPVS VASORVM ANTIQVORVM. In print book layout this is easily accomplished. Digitally, however, using Vs like this will make the title unreadable (and incorrect) to a machine user, including search engines.

The solution I intend on pursuing is to create a specialized version of a font that simply uses the V graphic in place of the U. In this way, it will look like a V to a human user, but read as U to a computer. Including when/if the title is copy and pasted off the site. The font would be applied only to the title as it appears on the cover, the half title and title page, and the side navigation.

The Quire template we'll be using uses Times and IBM Noto as its serif faces. The past Getty CVA volumes were set in Bembo, there's a nice open licensed version of Bembo from Edward Tufte that could work for at least the title of our digital version, if not also for the book as a whole.

[geealbers]

Another good font option would be Cardo, by David Perry. It is based on Bembo and designed specifically with scholarly publishing in mind and so includes a very wide range of special characters, as well as old-style figures and small caps support. In the test below, the body text also sets a little more consistently in its default settings.

[geealbers]

The final solution was to customize a copy of Cardo Regular to include a new open type stylistic set that sets a rule to display a capital U as a capital V. Meaning that it's still typed in correctly as ANTIQUORUM but displays as ANTIQVORVM. If you copy and paste the text into something else, it will read correctly with U. And it will read correctly to web crawlers and screen readers.

The custom stylistic set was labeled as "ss16", and could then be called with CSS:

.cva-title,
.cva-title-menu {
  font-feature-settings: "ss16";
}

There's good information on open type fonts and css at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Fonts/OpenType_fonts_guide.

Closed with 7ed8741

[geealbers]

Just a note that as it turns out, PrinceXML doesn't support this open type setting. (Though I thought I'd tested it.) in the end I just added logic to type out the Vs in the pdf output, but keep with the open type solution online.