Cissanthemos — A Ninth-Century Script Font

The Cissanthemos font is based on the Royal Bible, an elegant but fragmentary ninth-century English book written in insular hybrid minuscule. A color font, Cissanthemos’s text and other colors are based on those of the Royal Bible and other contemporary manuscripts. While the font’s colors are predefined, users can assign a color of their choosing to either text or fill.

This page demonstrates the capabilities of Cissanthemos and lets you play with its OpenType features. The text box is editable: type or paste in some of your favorite text to see how it would look in a ninth-century manuscript!

The page also shows how to override the colors in the Cissanthemos palette. Check the “Alternate colors” box to substitute a palette in which the text and rubric colors are different and the fill and shadow colors are both more saturated and differently ordered. Web developers can examine the CSS for this page (cissan.css) to learn how to do it. Unfortunately, most (perhaps all) desktop applications are unable to manipulate the palettes of a color font.