Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed. Elegant but with that distance that well-defined forms seem to impose. Her voice, however, was sweeter, closer, and when she spoke her name, like a slow whisper, one felt like what she had come to say could be read in her image. Rufina’s story can only be told through a detour because her origin does not coincide with her birth. Rufina was born on a Sunday afternoon while her father was drawing black letters on a white background, and her mother was trying to join those same letters to form words that could tell a story. But her origin goes much further back, and that is why she is pierced by a story that precedes her, even though it is not her own. Maybe her origin can be traced back to that autumn night in which that tall man with that distant demeanor ran into that woman with that sweet smile and elegant aspect. He looked at her in such a way that he was trapped by that gaze, even though they found no words to say to each other, and they stayed in silence. Somehow, some words leaked into that gaze because since that moment they were never apart again. Later, after they started talking, projects started coming up and then coexistence and arguments, routines and mismatches. But in that chaos of crossed words in their life together, something was stable through the silence of the gazes. In those gazes, the silent words sustained that indescribable love that they didn’t even try to understand. And in one of those silences, Rufina appeared, when that man told that woman that he needed a text to try out his new font, and she saw him look at her with that same fascination of the first time, and she started to write something with those forms that he was giving her as a gift. Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed, wrote her mother when Rufina was born. Photo (Fragilité): Karin Topolanski / Post: Raw (www.raw.com.uy) - María Pérez Gutiérrez

Arabetics Latte is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. While its seemingly-idiosyncratic Latin design eliminates the excessive usage of serifs and offsets the visual effects of several geometrically-intense glyphs, its Times Romanesque proportions gives a full nod to the beginnings of Latin types and produces an overall stable look-and-feel of a classical Serif style, making it suitable for both text and display applications. Liberal spacing is maintained throughout to match that of the Arabic text and is further supplemented by a careful implementation of a typical Latin kerning. The overall design of this font, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize well with most other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Latte fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Latte includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the tatweel key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Latte includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Milan-based Leftloft studio has produced a third leg to its hit Etica font family: LFT Etica Mono. Meant to be a coder’s go-to font for everyday use as much as a designer’s way to invoke a certain genre, it is part of a broader and more versatile family that already contains almost 80 sans and serif fonts. LFT Etica Mono’s ten weights carry the same modern, recognisable DNA of the Etica family while hewing to the defined requirements of a coding typeface: space, density, distinct forms, and clarity. It uses the same instroke on the ‘c’ and open form of the ‘a’ for which the Etica family is famous, but adds something new in the form of an additional italic style. Monospaced fonts usually incorporate slanted letters as italics, as does LFT Etica Mono, but its default italics have warmer, cursive shapes while the alternate italics are simply slanted. The default ‘a’ is a simplified bowl and stem instead of a two storey shape; the ‘d, f, i, l, t, y’ and others gain an outstroke tail; the ‘e’ is one smooth stroke; and the default ‘k’ is looped. These characters have basic, slanted alternates if the cursive look isn’t desired, and includes a set of arrows and geometric shapes. The monospaced design, by nature, makes the typeface useful in coding and in low readability situations. And how does LFT Etica Mono work from the designer’s perspective? The starting point was the need for a monospaced Etica companion intended for technical applications: captions in graphic layouts, small text, confined or predefined space, and overall tone. Flat terminals and counters maintain the colour and versatility of the original typeface, but choosing between the organic cursive or blunt slanted alphabet will give every layout its own character. Of particular aesthetic interest may be the & and % symbols. Designed to be applied to the common visual environment, the new LFT Etica Mono font family completes a more complex system. One benefit is to give an expressive tone — less serious and more friendly — to something inherently technical, to bytes and bots, to encode the beautiful life.

Albertina was a typeface ahead of its time. It was in the early 1960s when designer Chris Brand, an accomplished calligrapher, aspired to draw a typeface based on the principles of calligraphy. Unfortunately, typesetting machines of that era put many restrictions on designers. Characters had to be drawn within a very coarse grid, which also defined their spacing. Technological limitations meant that italic designs often had to share the same character widths as the romans. Designers were forced to draw italic faces much wider and with more open spacing than what would be typical in calligraphic lettering or hand-set type. Not surprisingly, production of the first Albertina fonts went very slowly. Brand would submit his character drawings, and the Monotype Drawing Office would modify them to be compatible with the company's typesetting equipment. The new drawings would then be sent back to Brand for approval or rework. Most were reworked. The process took so long, in fact, that by the time the face was completed it was once again out of phase with the times: instead of being released as metal type for the Monotype composing machines it had been tailored for, Albertina debuted as phototype fonts for the Monophoto typesetter. The design's first use was for a catalog of the work of Stanley Morison, exhibited at the Albertina Library in Brussels in 1966. Sales of the design were not remarkable. With the advent of digital type technology, Albertina's story took a far happier turn. Frank E. Blokland, of the Dutch Type Library, used Brand's original, uncompromised drawings as the foundation of a digital revival. The Monophoto version had taken a considerable battering from the limitations of Monotype's unit system," recalls Blokland, "but there was no need for me to incorporate these restrictions in the digital version." With the full backing of Monotype and original designer Brand looking over Blokland's shoulder, a new design for Albertina emerged, displaying all the grace and verve of Brand's original drawings. The basic family drawn by Brand also grew into three weights, each with an italic complement and a suite of small caps and old style figures."