Swansbury, Inc. provides handwriting instruction to all ages, accompanied by two exemplar fonts, Barchowsky Fluent Hand.otf and Barchowsky Dot.otf. The basis for the design of the characters is the italic of the Renaissance. With the advantage of contextual alternates, Barchowsky Fluent Hand automatically joins lowercase letters so it can be used in any venue where a clean and elegant appearance of handwriting is desired. The fonts allow maximum instructional flexibility. Aside from their use in lesson plans, educators can customize pages for specific student interests, studies and needs. Included are all math symbols that one typically encounters in school curricula. Nan Jay Barchowsky, designer of this font, believes that children should hone their handwriting skills as they learn all subjects, reading, math, history and foreign languages. Both fonts support all Western European languages and Turkish. Barchowsky Dot is for young children or others who need remediation. The letterforms are identical to those in Barchowsky Fluent Hand. Used at a large point size open dots appear within the lines that form the characters indicating where one should start each stroke in a letter or number. Once formations are learned Barchowsky Fluent Hand can be used with the contextual alternates turned off until students are ready to write in the joined-up manner of a true cursive. Specifications: The technology for fonts that automatically join letters, or allow them to be unjoined is relatively new. At present, both fonts work on Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later (or Vista), using AbiWord, a free word processor (go to abisource.com). They also work well with InDesign 2. Currently there is an unknown factor in later versions of InDesign for Windows that disallows joining. Macs completely support the fonts using InDesign 2 and later, PhotoshopCS and IllustratorCS. If you do not have these applications, there is an inexpensive word processor for Macs.

Big Band JNL is a classic Art Deco typeface in every sense of the word. Large, bold and innovative in its sectional construction, the font is based on a lettering example found in a 1941 Speedball® Lettering Pen instruction book. The basic alphabet was used for the model, with a new set of numbers and additional characters created by Jeff Levine in order to make this font fully functional in today’s digital designs.

Controlled casualness is the watchword in this new handwriting script from the prolific young French designer Éric de Berranger, who also designed the sans serif type family ITC Octone. ITC Berranger Hand has its roots in chancery calligraphy, yet its surface looks like contemporary informal lettering that was written quickly with a felt-tip pen on slightly absorbent paper. The counters of some letters appear to almost fill in from ink spread, yet Berranger Hand is admirably readable at small sizes. The capital letters are restrained, without swashes, so they can be used together in all-caps combinations.

Years before the many "modern" ways to creates signs and posters, the popular method was the rubber stamp printing set. Many of these sets used the classic DeVinne typeface, and were manufactured by at least a half dozen different companies. The "sign and chart printers" (as they were known) often consisted of both upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation, pointing hands and other symbols. "Hand Stamped JNL" puts all the fun of the rubber stamp printing set into an easy-to-use digital font with no messy ink spills or clean-up.

The Serif Hand is a handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. We wanted to create the most generic, readable and balanced serif handwritten font, to work well in every kind of design. It’s an all-caps font with 5 finely balanced weights with alternates: all the uppercase letters are a bit different from the lowercase letters. We also designed a playful dotted weight, to add a fancy touch if needed. We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Ranch Hand JNL is a tall, condensed wood type with slab serifs. The font is somewhat bolder in weight than Nostrand JNL, but like its counterpart, fully captures the spirit and flavor of Nineteenth Century advertising, fliers and notices.