Dilyana Font

The Budapest Glagolitic Fragments (Budapest, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, MS Duod. Eccl. Slav. 2) are two fragments from a parchment manuscript containing nine lines of text from the Old Slavonic translation of the Life of St Symeon Stylites written in round glagolitic script; they are almost certainly the oldest witness to the Slavonic version. The fragments have been edited twice in paper editions, by Király in 1955 and by Reinhart and Turilov in 1989-90. The object of the present study is therefore not primarily to publish the text as such, but rather to demonstrate the potential of the new technology for the encoding, edition and publication of glagolitic texts, and to encourage its use for this purpose. Nevertheless, some new contributions to the study of the fragments are made in the commentary to the edition.

The original edition was encoded in SGML in 2001. This was followed by an XML version two years later, reflecting the advances in technology made over that period. The inclusion of glagolitic in Unicode 4.1, published on Thursday, 31 March 2005, now at last makes possible not only a revised, Unicode-compliant XML edition, but also an HTML encoding.

Before glagolitic was included in Unicode, encodings were of necessity font-specific. This is no longer the case, and the new edition will be displayed correctly with any Unicode-conformant font that includes the glagolitic characters. If there is no font with the requisite range of characters installed on the system, the browser will probably display question marks or something similar instead of glagolitic. This can be cured by installing a font which does have them. Since such fonts are unlikely to be numerous at the time of writing, I have made the font Dilyana.ttf available for downloading.