Palemonas Lithuanian Philological Font
Palemonas is the name given to the character set necessary for
Lithuanian philology studies, as well as the actual computer font wherein this
character set has been practically implemented.
Palemonas font project was initiated by the State Commission of
the Lithuanian Language. The work group, supervised by Vladas Tumasonis, also
included Mindaugas Strockis, Petras Skirmantas (all from the
The primary reason initiating the
designing of Palemonas was the need
of special characters used in Lithuanian philology, those of Lithuanian
phonetic transcription (used mostly in the study of dialects), obsolete letters
used by early Lithuanian authors, as well as special symbols for other
linguistic disciplines related to Lithuanian philology.
A number of computer fonts for these
purposes, implemented mostly in the obsolescent technology of non-standard assignment of 8-bit character codes, have been created in Lithuanian
scholarly institutions since the beginning of the computer era. In those fonts,
individual encoding schemes were devised on ad-hoc basis with no regard
whatsoever to mutual compatibility. Palemonas
is intended to replace this chaotic multitude of one-off solutions with a
unified character encoding system.
The present version of Palemonas includes approximately 4,300
special characters. The character inventory is based on the analysis of
available old Lithuanian texts, phonetically transcribed dialectal texts, and a
number of linguistic books and journals. The needs of Baltic and Indo-European
philology specialists have been taken into account as well, so Palemonas also includes extended Greek
and Cyrillic character sets.
Although Palemonas is primarily meant for scholarly work, it can also serve
for general purpose texts.
Character codes of Palemonas are in line with the existing
official character codes in the Unicode Standard. Those characters which do not
exist in the official Unicode charts are available in Palemonas as Private Use Area (PUA) characters. Characters with
diacritic marks can be expressed by composite sequences, the constituents of
which are legitimate Unicode characters.
The Palemonas group constantly keeps an eye on the developments of the
Unicode Standard, and when necessary, updates the character set and the
documentation.
We express especial thanks for the
State Commission of the Lithuanian Language for rendering every kind of
assistance. We would be also grateful to the users for suggestions on the font
design and the inventory of characters. You can find code charts of Palemonas here.
