Font Design

Archive for the ‘TrueType Fonts’ Category

This month’s free font download at Softmaker is Delano Caps. The font is available at http://www.freefont.de/us. It is available in 3 formats – Windows TrueType and Type 1 PostScript and Macintosh Type 1 PostScript.

Delano Caps is a Display font and its attributes include decorative, engraving, caps only. Delano Caps is similar to URW Dextor which was originally designed by L. Meuffels in 1994. Dextor was originally offered by the French company, Mecanorma. It is also offered by URW, Linotype and Scangraphic.

Check back often for information on font design and font editing.

This month’s free font download at Softmaker (http://www.freefont.de/us/index.htm) is Henderson. It is available in 3 formats: TrueType Windows, Type 1 PostScript Windows and Type 1 Macintosh. Henderson is based on the Linotype Hawthorn typeface. Hawthorn is a serif typeface created for display usage. It was created by Mike Daines in 1968.

Henderson combines both round and sharp stems and serifs and it has a distinct, late 60s feel. It is at home with the late 60s pop art feel of its era. Its sharp and pointy serifs are probably its most unique feature. Henderson is slightly condensed with tall x-heights like many other display faces intended for use is advertising headlines.

This month’s free font download from Softmaker is Stone Handwriting. Each month, a new font is available as a free download from the same url: http://www.freefont.de/us/index.htm. There are a ton of handwriting fonts available online and a lot of them are unsuitable for many layouts because they are messy in appearance. This one has a nice, neat and clean feel. The characters have a uniform height, but does not appear to be draftsman-like, thus lending itself to informal usage without being messy.

This font comes in TrueType (TTF) and OpenType PostScript (OTF) formats. The PostScript variety makes it a good candidate for professional layouts output by printers and service bureaus.

WhatTheFont is a free online font identification web form available at MyFonts.com (http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/). It is the best, most reliable font identification tool that I have found. The way it works is that you upload an image file with a sample of the font you want to identify. Then it runs a character recognition script on the sample where it identifies each letter. You will be sent to a screen where you can make adjustments in case of an error. You can also re-combine compound shapes that have become separated – such as the dot over the lower case “i” or “j” or the dot under the question mark or exclamation point. The screen allows you to drag and drop the separated part over the character it has been separated from and re-combine the compound shape. When you are finished making adjustments, simply press the “Search” button and it will send you to a search results page with a list of candidates for the font.

WhatTheFont supports most common image file formats such as BMP, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. The website offers tips for getting a good result, such as the maximum size of the uploaded image and the optimum number of pixels for the letter height.

The results are very impressive. Even with a low resolution sample, if it is upsampled in Photoshop and steps are taken to create a clean image, the results can be spot on. You can use Photoshop to clean up the image by converting all the characters to black and white and adjusting the brightness and contrast to get nice, dark letters. Then you can go to the trouble to make sure each letter is separated by a little space.

I have used this tool over and over and it has saved me a ton of time looking through specimen sheets trying to find that font that I just know, but can’t remember the name.

The TrueType font format is the most common type of font in use today. It was developed together by Microsoft and Apple. It uses the Unicode encoding method. One advantage to Unicode is is that the font can have more than 256 glyphs.