This collection of decorative initials culled from specimen books of the late 1800s will add nostalgic charm to any project.

Railroad Gothic Pro is a condensed, sans serif typeface, exclusively licensed from the Ludlow Collection. The original Railroad Gothic was produced by Ludlow in the early 1900’s, and Steve Jackaman (ITF) produced the digital version in 2017. The font provides support for Latin 1, Central, and Eastern European languages, and Cyrillic. Railroad Gothic Pro is reminiscent of typefaces used in 1900’s railyards, hence the name.

In the 1946 French lettering book “100 Alphabets Publicitaires” (“100 Advertising Alphabets”) is a hand-lettered “Western” font called “Italian". This served as the basis for Cattle Town JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This font began as an attempt of draw alternatives to the images of Microsoft’s Wingdings, but then grew beyond that. This new version from late 2010 has over 1400 characters, including almost all of the geometric shapes in unicode 2500 and 2B00 ranges, almost all of the arrows in the unicode 2100, 2700, 2900, and 2B00 ranges, almost all of the dingbats and symbols in the unicode 2600 and 2700 ranges, many of the pictures, symbols, and emoticons in the 1F300 to 1F600 ranges, and a few of the miscellaneous technical items in the 2300 range. There are also pictures on the standard open type letters, most of which can be accessed from the keyboard. However, most of the characters in this typeface have to be accessed using their unicode designation. In Windows this is done with the alt key and the unicode hex number. On the Macintosh the easiest way (and for the five digit unicode characters, perhaps the only way) is to use the “Special Characters” window under the Edit Menu in the Finder. A unicode index of the font is provided in a pdf file that was generated using FontLab. However, it only has four of the unicode digits for the five-digit elements. Almost all of the unicode numbers starting with F should have a 1 in front of the F.

Amidst the pages of the 1946 foreign-printed "100 Alphabets Publicitaires" ("100 Advertising Alphabets") was an example of a beautiful vertical script type design with a somewhat calligraphic look. This became the work model for Script Spot Initials JNL.