Dear Madam or Sir, on <http://www.waldenfont.com/products/gbp/gbp.asp>, you are offering a collection of beautiful German Fraktur, and Kurrent, fonts.
However, I perceive a major obstacle for their application: You have based your fonts on a proprietary encoding; in particular, the Long S and the mandatory ligatures, are encoded in a non-standard way. This means that every existing text must be rewritten in order to be rendered with one of your fonts, and that your fonts cannot be used in an open environment, such as viewing WWW pages. Now, both up-to-date text-processors and WWW-browsers, exploit the Unicode encoding standard which comprises a wide range of characters, including the Long S (U+017F), the Round S (U+0073), some Latin-script ligatures (ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and st, at U+FB00 through FB05), and a large private-use area which could be exploited for even more ligat- ures. E. g., MS-Word has been based on Unicode since version Word-97, Netscape Navigator has been able to display Unicode-encoded text since version 3. Now the question is, whether you would be willing to add a Unicode CMAP to your fonts, so they could be used to render Unicode-encoded text. The Unicode standard assigns to the rendering process the task of finding an adequate ligature; so a Unicode-enabled Fraktur font should have assigned suitable pairs of characters to the available ligatures. For a Fraktur font, this should work at least for the mandatory ch, ck, ff, fi, fl, ft, ll, sch, si, ss, st, sz, and tz ligatures (where "s" represents the Long S). (The above-mentioned ligature, and private-use, code-points are meant mainly for legacy data, or for very special linguistic needs, such as faithfully reproducing Gutenberg's printing with its large set of ligatures.) The Unicode standard, including code charts, can be found at <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/standard.html>. Distinguishing Round S from Long S is straightforwrd; ligatures are discussed in sections 2.1 (very briefly), 2.6 and 13.2, and the above-mentioned code points for Latin ligatures are discussed at the end of section 7.1. For German text, a ligature between the constituents of a composition would be prohibited by inserting one of the Unicode controls discussed in section 13.2, such as SHY (U+00AD) or ZWNJ (U+200C). Thank you in advance for your response. Best wishes, Otto Stolz