What is "sylfaen"

Sylfaen is a multi-script serif font family designed by John Hudson and W. Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks, and Geraldine Wade of Monotype Typography. The name Sylfaen is a Welsh word meaning foundation.

In 1997, Tiro was hired by Microsoft Typography to consult on the production of support materials for OpenType font development. Part of this project was producing a multi-script font used for displaying glyphs in Microsoft's cancelled Web Resource for International Typography (WRIT) database, which was a tool for establishing character and glyph requirements for given languages, geographical areas or scripts (or combinations thereof). The project included support for Latin, IPA, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopian characters.

Latin glyphs were designed by John Hudson, and the first script developed for Sylfaen.

Cyrillic glyphs were designed by John Hudson. The design was reviewed by Maxim Zhukov, typographic coordinator for the United Nations.

Greek glyphs were designed by Geraldine Wade, based on the Latin glyphs, with consultation from Gerry Leonidas. Only the glyphs used in monotonic orthography are available.

Armenian glyphs were designed by Geraldine Wade, under the guidance of Armenian type designer Manvel Shmavonyan, and his Russian colleague Vladimir Yefimov at ParaType in Moscow. It includes 'classical caps', which are based on the tall capitals in Armenian manuscript.

Georgian glyphs include khutsuri and mxedruli letters. The development of the Georgian script came to a halt when Georgian type designer Anton Dumbadze was fatally struck by a car before being able to finish the design. As a result the font is incomplete.

Ethiopic glyphs were designed by Geraldine Wade.

The font shipped with Windows 2000 and XP only include a subset of the original designs. In particular, IPA, Polytonic Greek, Ethiopic glyphs are missing. It supports WGL4, Armenian script, and the minuscules of the Georgian alphabet. OpenType features include small caps, glyph substitution.

Sylfaen is a Welsh word meaning foundation. As a result, there are a number of places named Sylfaen in Wales, including:

• Sylfaen, Carmarthenshire - a hamlet in Carmarthenshire
• Sylfaen, Powys - a hamlet in Powys, the location of a railway station on the Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway