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Textus Receptus is a historical revival based on the Roman and Greek types used by Johann Bebel (and later also Michael Isengrin) in Basel in the 1520s.
The Roman is a low-contrast medium-to-heavy Venetian reminiscent of Jenson or Golden Type. The unusual polytonic Greek, not previously digitized, is lighter in weight and supplied with all the ligatures and variants of the original. Yet when used without historial forms the Greek has a surprisingly contemporary feel: it’s quirky and playful as a display face, but still easily legible in running text.
Bebel’s Greek extended and refined the one used for the first printed Greek New Testament, Desiderius Erasmus’ Novum Instrumentum Omne, published in Basel in 1516 by Johann Froben. The name of the font was chosen in honor of this edition, which was so influential that it was later called the Textus Receptus (the “received text”), serving as the basis for Luther’s German Bible in 1522 and much subsequent scholarship for over 300 years.
Following 16th century practice, Textus Receptus contains 130 ligatures and stylistic alternates for Greek, accessible either with OpenType features or with five stylistic sets. The Greek capitals, often printed bare in early editions, have been equipped with accents and breathings for proper polytonic or monotonic typesetting.
The Roman includes both standard and historical ligatures along with the abbreviations and diacritics typically employed in early printed Latin. For expanded language coverage it has the entire unicode Latin Extended‑A range and part of Latin Extended-B. The capital A is surmounted by a horizontal stroke, as in some 16th century Italian designs, and the hyphen and question mark have both modern and historical form variants.
Mark-to-base positioning correctly renders fifty combining diacritics, and with mark-to-mark positioning the most common diacritics may be stacked, permitting, for example, accents and breathings on top of length-marked vowels. Numerals include old-style, proportional lining and tabular lining.
For further details, please download the 31-page Textus Receptus User Guide.
