Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books inspired future typographic developments. In 1913, the English Monotype Corporation's manager Frank Hinman Pierpont directed the Plantin revival. Based on 16th century specimens from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, specifically a type cut by Robert Granjon and a separate cursive Italic, the Plantin" typeface was conceived. Plantin was drawn for use in mechanical typesetting on the international publishing markets. Plantin, and the historical models that inspired it, are old-style typefaces in the French manner, but with x-height that are larger than those found in Claude Garamond's work. Plantin would go on to influence another Monotype design, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison and Victor Larent used Plantin as a reference during that typeface's cutting. Like Garamond, Plantin is exceptionally legible and makes a classic, elegant impression. Plantin is indeed a remarkably accommodating type face. The firm modelling of the strokes and the serifs in the letters make the mass appearance stronger than usual; the absence of thin elements ensures a good result on coated papers; and the compact structure of the letters, without loss of size makes Plantin one of the economical faces in use. In short, it is essentially an all-purpose face, excellent for periodical or jobbing work, and very effective in many sorts of book and magazine publishing. Plantin's Bold weight was especially optimized to provide ample contrast: bulkiness was avoided by introducing a slight sharpening to the serifs' forms."

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

The hand-brushed Fave™ Set has ten informal scripts and other handwritten fonts made up of two subfamilies: Fave and the even-more informal Fave Casual, each have a primary script with a bold version and three other handwritten faces for a total of ten typefaces spanning the casual spectrum. All are optimized for large type use too so they look as good up close as they do set at smaller sizes. OpenType features The Fave family has a few features that happen largely in the background. All of the fonts use the OpenType Standard Ligature feature to automatically differentiate consecutive lowercase letters and numbers (using separate glyphs) and like our previous release Turbinado, they also automatically differentiate like characters that are separated by another letter. Alternate characters The script fonts have alternate uppercase and lowercase characters including multiple t (and double t) crossbar alternates that can be selected from the OpenType glyph table. Enable Contextual Alternates feature to automatically insert a bigger crossbar as the surrounding letters allow throughout a text box or document. You can also make your own custom lowercase t and crossbar to fit any situation–all of the lowercase t ascenders and crossbars are available separately in the OpenType glyph table, and can be combined and moved around manually. Stylistic sets and other goodies Fave Script and its bold counterpart have two Stylistic Sets. When enabled, one automatically substitutes non-connecting alternate characters at the ends of words, the other substitutes even bigger t crossbars than the Standard Ligature feature does. Smart apostrophes and ligatures Other subtle but hopefully helpful features include smart apostrophes, which insert themselves between two script characters in common situations without breaking their connection, and a few ligatures that also make character connections more seamless.

Night Train is a new font built from the ground up; while Night Train may resemble an old classic wood type there are a few lines that make this font a little more modern setting it apart from other wood type revivals. If you're a railroad enthusiast you're sure to enjoy the steam locomotive graphic located on the less than and greater than keys on all versions of this font, due to the fine detail of this train illustration the best printing results will be at 600dpi or higher on a laser printer. An alternate K and R are within the Night Train fonts, for Win Type1 these alternates are on the left and right bracket keys, for Truetype and OpenType you may access the alternates by using the Character Map in Windows or Adobe Illustrator, for OpenType you may also find them on the stylistic alternates page of the glyph map in Illustrator. There's something new with Night Train that the sign making people will love, for the first time FontMesa is pleased to offer a block shadowed version in four directions. One fill font is all that is needed for all four open faced fonts, you'll need an application that works in layers in order to use the fill font with the open faced fonts, simply place the fill font in its own layer then move it behind one of the open faced fonts of Night Train. The Night Train name has been on my list to use as a font name for a few years, a friend from years ago used to sail his boat in the Mackinac race from Chicago to Mackinac Island, the name of that boat was the Night Train. Watching the 2010 Olympic four man U.S. bobsled team win gold with their sled also called Night Train has inspired me to complete this font.

A girl’s handwriting written on the iPad Writing changes – throughout history over centuries, but also from generation to generation. Each new generation of students learns to write the basic forms of the letters a little differently than their predecessors. The role model is also changing. The cursive handwriting taught in school is getting closer and closer to printed type. The children no longer learn the forms of cursive handwriting required for connected writing, but first the “block letters”, only later should they develop their own individual handwriting from this, which many of them no longer do. And the writing tool is also changing. Of course, script looks different when children no longer learn to write on paper with a fountain pen, but on a tablet computer with the “pencil”. The writing experience is completely different, and the “material properties” are different too. There is practically no writing resistance that would make it difficult to move against the direction of writing. "Die Lara" was created based on the template by Lara Mörwald from the winter of 2023. The font version "Black" corresponds to the handwritten original, all thinner variants up to the wafer-thin "Hairline" are derived from it. In the variable font, the intermediate forms can be selected steplessly. In order to preserve the handwritten character of the font, "Die Lara" contains several alternates to most letters and numerals, so that different character forms alternate in the typeface. If the "ligatures" function is activated in the app (which is the default in most programs), these alternates appear automatically as you type. There is also an alternative "swashed" variant of some letters. So you can set somewhat livelier accents at the beginning or end of a word. "Die Lara" also contains fractions and tabular figures.

Kilkenny is a decorative, Victorian-style font based on the metal type named Nymphic that was designed by Hermann Ihlenberg. Ihlenburg was born in Germany in 1843 where he studied art and worked for several German type foundries. He moved to the USA in 1866 and worked for the L. Johnson & Co. foundry, later MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan. American Type Founders acquired this typeface when they took over the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry and Nymphic appears in the ATF catalog of 1896. For this digital version, the character set has been expanded to include accented characters, punctuation, and currency symbols—and most everything you would expect to find in a digital font. The original metal font consisted of swash caps, upper case characters, and a “morticed” lower case, which was raised off the baseline. This mortcied form was designed to nestle inside the ornate swash caps as well as to work with the upper case. The five digital versions contained in this set are basically different configurations of these different alphabet sets, they differ as follows: Kilkenny—the original upper case version with a modified lower case that has been enlarged, shifted to align along the baseline, and given taller ascenders to give it a more “regular” appearance. Kilkenny Eureka—true to the original design with the “morticed” or superior lowercase forms. Kilkenny Swash—original swash caps with the modified lower case. Kilkenny Swash Caps—original swash caps with the original caps as the lower case. Kilkenny Swash Eureka—swash caps that have been adjusted to match the weight of the original lower case forms. The OpenType version contains all of the above, plus additional Central European and Cyrillic characters for a total of almost 1000 glyphs.

Created with headline, logo and other short display work in mind, Duende comes in two weights with alternates for the upper and lowercase, consecutive characters are controlled with the OpenType Ligature feature. Display bigger lowercase crossbars as the surrounding characters allow with OpenType Contextual Alternates on, or create your own custom lowercase f or t with a non-crossbar character and one of the included crossbar options Other features include case-sensitive quotes and smart apostrophes. Duende has an alternate for every capital letter and multiple alternate options for the lowercase including swashy terminal characters and non-connecting alternates. Also included are a few clip-on swash elements that can be used to create initial and terminal forms. Duende uses smart crossbars for common situations, unifying Af, Aft, At, Att, Aff, tt and ff with a single crossbar when the OpenType Ligature feature in on. The Ligature feature also ensures subtle baseline variation when two lowercase characters are keyed twice in a row. Enable Contextual Alternates in your OpenType menu and Duende uses bigger f and t crossbars as the surrounding characters allow. Enable Discretionary Ligatures for lowercase o connections. You can also make your own lowercase f and t to fit any situation combining one of the included crossbars and non-crossbar f or t characters (available as ‘Alternates for Current Selection’ when f or t is selected). Just select the crossbar you want from the glyph table as a separate text element and move it anywhere. Also included are ten tt ligatures with crossbars and one without. Duende also has a few other swashy things that can be used to cross the lowercase f and t. Customize alternate capitals U, V, W, X and Y with any one of the swash options available in the glyph table for those characters.