Typewriter font
Under typewriter is understood not proportional fonts mechanical or electrical typewriters . Moreover typewriter fonts have been since the end of the 19th century for the great variation in hot metal produced. So the "Manual of fonts" in 1926 already recorded 46 different deliverable hand typefaces . This z. B. Cover letters and offers printed on business letterhead. At the end of the 20th century , typewriter fonts also came on the market as digital versions.
Special properties
In a typewriter font, all characters have the same thickness , i.e. a fixed width . This leads to special adaptations of the forms: a lower case i has to be artificially widened, a capital M has to be narrowed. Normal fonts , with a narrow i and a wide M, are called proportional fonts .
Typewriter fonts in the form of types must be very robust, especially fine and thin lines are forbidden. They therefore usually have a very uniform stroke width and in this respect resemble the Egyptienne .
There are very different typewriter fonts: those with serifs (such as Courier , Pica or Computer Modern Typewriter ), sans serif (such as Lucida Typewriter ) and even a typewriter script called Roma (for the ball-head typewriter from IBM).
The later electric and electronic typewriters with inexpensive exchangeable fonts knew other fonts. The best-known among them are Letter Gothic (a largely sans serif font), Prestige (a serif font with line width contrast ), Quadro (a somewhat angular, largely sans serif font) and Script (a type of cursive font). There were a number of variants of these basic types, as well as type carriers with special characters - for example for mathematical formulas.
The font sizes did not differ significantly from one another. It was not until the electronic typewriter that three standardized sizes were introduced: 10, 12 and 15 characters per inch (CPI). Some typewriter manufacturers also supplied mechanical typewriters in other sizes. However, the most common standard size was 10 CPI in pica font . But there were also machines with 12 CPI, mostly the font Elite was used for this. Although the Pica font could certainly also be used in a reduced size with 12 CPI, Pica and Elite also refer to the font density, regardless of the font used. So the Prestige Elite font is 12 CPI and Prestige Pica is 10 CPI, although the Prestige font is not very similar to the Pica font . Fonts in 15 CPI are also known as micron .
Later there were also typewriters with proportional font , such as the IBM Selectric Composer (1966). These fonts were often variants of Times-like and Helvetica-like fonts. Adrian Frutiger adapted a version of his Univers specifically to the Selectric Composer system based on 9 possible thicknesses. These typewriters were often used for smaller typesetting work as an alternative to the typesetting machines used by printing companies, and the texts they produce also look more typeset than typed. That is why today the non-proportional fonts are still mainly associated with the term typewriter font.
Commonly used non-proportional fonts
The change of fonts came into question mainly after the frequent use of ball heads and type wheels. There were occasionally earlier, historical, alternating-type carriers, see z. B. Blickensderfer . The possibility of changing in principle does not mean, however, that changing the type wheel was often used. Type wheels cost the equivalent of around 50 euros in the 1990s, and ball heads considerably more because of the special torsional stiffness required. In private households, the use of several type carriers was therefore the exception. Typewriters with a type carrier for 10 and 12 CPI were supplied as standard. At 12 characters per inch, the character spacing was marginal and the font was designed so that the spacing at 10 characters did not seem too large. However, between 12 and 15 CPI, this distance seemed too large for common type carriers.
The following fonts were common - increments in brackets (10, 12, 1012 for both, 15):
- Serif fonts
- Prestige (10, 1012, 12, also italic 1012)
- Pica (10) or Elite (12, rarely 15)
- Brougham (10, 12, 15)
- Sans serif fonts
- Letter Gothic (12)
- Quadro (rarely 10, 1012, 12, 15)
- Grande (mostly only 10)
- various OCR fonts (mostly only 10)
- Manuscripts
- Script (10, 12, with Brother also 1012)
- Roma (10, 12)
Typewriter fracture types
In the first half of the 20th century there were also typewriters with fracture types in German-speaking countries . These generally had the fracture-typical ligatures ch, ck, tz, st and the long s as additional characters. The typewriter fracture was not unified, that is, there were several versions. The most common was a script derived from the common book fracture. But there were also Schwabacher (or the so-called Neue Schwabacher) and simple textured fonts . Some of these Gothic fonts also had slightly different weights. A special feature of these typewriters, at least for some, was that the keycaps were also labeled in Gothic script. The Gothic fonts did not establish themselves on the typewriter because they are very difficult to read as non-proportional typewriter fonts. Attempts to equip typewriters with proportional Gothic fonts also failed.
Digitized typewriter fonts
Now that the typewriter has become almost obsolete, a number of typewriter fonts continue to exist in digitized form as computer fonts . A distinction can be made between the fonts, often referred to as the rough version, which imitate the irregularities in the stroke, the smudging of the color and the structure of the ribbon, and the clean digitization, which is based on the original shape of the metal types.
Examples of clean digitization are e.g. B. the font families Courier , Typewriter MT and Typewriter Elite MT (Monotype), Letter Gothic Std, Orator Std and Prestige Elite Std (Adobe), FF Magda Clean and FF Elementa (FontFont), Pica 10 Pitch BT and Script 12 Pitch BT ( Bitstream).
Of the Rough versions abound, many well as free fonts. The first commercial, rough digitized typewriter font was FF Trixie (1991) by Erik van Blokland.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Handbook of Fonts. A compilation of the fonts of the type foundries of the German language, sorted by genre. Albrecht Seemann Verlag, Leipzig, 1926.
- ↑ http://www.letterror.com/fonts/trixie.html