What alternatives are there to allrunes for displaying futhark?

Question

The February 2020 release of LaTeX introduced a \swdefault command for working with "swash" text which, unfortunately, breaks the allrunes package, which has a \swdefault command of its own. Now any attempt to typeset a LaTeX document that uses allrunes fails with "! LaTeX Error: Command \swdefault already defined."

Until allrunes is updated to no longer have this command, how can one typeset text in runes/futhark? If the answer involves extracting individual glyphs from the package, the ones I'm interested in are \textarc{d} (ᛞ, U+16DE) and \textarc{w} (ᚹ, U+16B9).

Answer 1

allrunes will need a real overhaul to make it compatible with the improved series handling in LaTeX. But if you need only the two symbols you mentioned you can try something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\DeclareFontShapeWithSizes}[5]{%
  \DeclareFontShape{#1}{#2}{#3}{#4}{%
   <5><6><7><8><9><10><10.95><12><14.4><17.28><20.74><24.88><29.86><35.83> #5}{}}

\newcommand{\DeclareRuneSeparators}[1]{} %if needed copy the whole definition

\input{arc.fd}

\begin{document}
abc \textarc{d} \textarc{w}
\end{document}

Answer 2

You can use the sty file from here: arXiv-safe. It replaces allrunes.dtx

\swdefault has been renamed to \swdefaultpatch

The simplest is to save it to your working directory.