Adrian Frutiger’s distinguished and successful 1966 design for the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association improving readability of letters for both machines and humans. OCR-B is replacing OCR-A.

OCR A and OCR B are standardized, monospaced fonts designed for Optical Character Recognition" on electronic devices. OCR A was developed to meet the standards set by the American National Standards Institute in 1966 for the processing of documents by banks, credit card companies and similar businesses. This font was intended to be "read" by scanning devices, and not necessarily by humans. However, because of its "techno" look, it has been re-discovered for advertising and display graphics. OCR B was designed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger to meet the standards of the European Computer Manufacturer's Association. It was intended for use on products that were to be scanned by electronic devices as well as read by humans. OCR B was made a world standard in 1973, and is more legible to human eyes than most other OCR fonts. Though less appealingly geeky than OCR A, the OCR B version also has a distinctive technical appearance that makes it a hit with graphic designers.

Since the release of these fonts most typefaces in the Scangraphic Type Collection appear in two versions. One is designed specifically for headline typesetting (SH: Scangraphic Headline Types) and one specifically for text typesetting (SB Scangraphic Bodytypes). The most obvious differentiation can be found in the spacing. That of the Bodytypes is adjusted for readability. That of the Headline Types is decidedly more narrow in order to do justice to the requirements of headline typesetting. The kerning tables, as well, have been individualized for each of these type varieties. In addition to the adjustment of spacing, there are also adjustments in the design. For the Bodytypes, fine spaces were created which prevented the smear effect on acute angles in small typesizes. For a number of Bodytypes, hairlines and serifs were thickened or the whole typeface was adjusted to meet the optical requirements for setting type in small sizes. For the German lower-case diacritical marks, all Headline Types complements contain alternative integrated accents which allow the compact setting of lower-case headlines.

Being a geometric sanserif ocr-t comes in eleven weights from ultrawhite to infrablack (brightwhite, white, silver, lightgrey, grey, darkgrey, anthracite, black, jetblack). With more than 600 glyphs it covers all your typographic needs and manages to stay at the same place no matter which width you’re using. Its readability and legibility is more than fine although it needs no kerning. The infrablack is really black, in order to achieve this, the form of letters change from darkgrey to anthracite from upright to some kind of upright italic. This also gives opportunity to mix two weights with same colour but different architecture. Find also stylistic sets, alternate letters, lots of bullets, different arrows, hands and well: kind of hearts.

The goal of this font design was to create forms which could be used and reproduced electronically and remain legible. Technicians from the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association and Adrian Frutiger combined strict mathematical criteria with typographic tradition to solve both technical and aesthetic problems. OCR was the resulting font and was made a world standard in 1973. The font has an objective, technical character and was created specifically for multimedia, although its distinctive appearance has also made it a popular typographical trend.

A set of capitals adequate for machine reading only; this barely legible pioneer sees declining use.

Designed at ParaType in 1997 by Tagir Safayev. Based on OCR-A typeface (1968) of American Type Founders. A simple sans serif typeface designed to meet the requirements of the US Bureau of Standards for optical character recognition.

Quercus is characterised by open, yet a little bit condensed drawing with sufficient spacing so that the neighbouring letters never touch. It has eight interpolated weights with respective italics. Their fine gradation allows to find an exact valeur for any kind of design, especially on the web. Quercus serif styles took inspiration from classicistic typefaces with vertical shadows, ball terminals and thin serifs. The italics have the same width proportion as upright styles. This “modern” attitude is applied to both families and calls for use on the same page, e g in dictionaries and cultural programmes. Serif styles marked by “10” are dedicated to textual point sizes and long reading. The sans-serif principle is rather minimalistic, with subtle shadows and thinned joints between curved shapes and stems. Quercus family comprises of the usual functionality such as Small Caps, Cyrillics, diacritics, ligatures, scientific and aesthetic variants, swashes, and other bells & whistles. It excels in informational and magazine design, corporate identity and branding, but it’s very well suited for book covers, catalogues and posters as well. When choosing a name for this typeface I've been staring out from my studio window, thinking helplessly without any idea in sight. Suddenly I realised that all I can see is a spectacular alley of oaks (Quercus in Latin) surrounding my house. These oaks were planted by the builders of local ponds under the leadership of Jakub Krčín in the fifteenth century.

LOGX-10 is a geometric minimalistic all-caps display typeface. Designed for strong headers, original graphic designs, visual identification and for many types of designs. It works not only in headings and subtitles but also in arrangements of various sizes and long text.

Get to know Norman, elegant and fashion forward. This new condensed and high contrast serif font is based on expansion giving a sense of self confidence. The oblique ax was specially added to get a contemporary and innovative sense. Norman is young and idealist, he has a distinctive sense of style. A complete set of ligatures and stylistic alternates is included, this will help the designer to customize and give a special look to any layout. We recommend to use it for big title, magazine, editorial purposes and display. Norman Family contains 2 styles, Regular and Italic, both fonts have another version a bit heavier called Regular 2 and Italic 2.

A funky, lively display font originally designed for a tourism publication.

Acre is a geometric sans-serif type family of eight weights that's both inspired by and named after my great grandfather, Tex Acre. Tex was an artist and sign maker whose handcrafted signs illuminated the roadsides of the American Midwest and typified mid-century Americana. Acre is a tribute to him, his work, and many of my favorite early 20th century geometric typefaces. With eight weights ranging from Thin to Black, Acre is an extremely versatile family that can be used for display, text, or anything in between. Acre offers full European language support plus many OpenType features such as tabular and oldstyle figures.

Norma was my second sans serif. You can find a few details in common with Dialog, but the graphic impression of Norma is totally different.Every typeface has some characters that are the favourites. In Norma I simply love the lowercase roman a. Don't you, too, think that it is perfection itself? Norma was released in 1994.

A calligrapher, graphic designer and teacher, Duško Trifunović of Belgrade created this handsome calligraphic typeface called Sloboda. It has an open design, an outline of sorts, and though the lowercase is small and compact, it sets beautifully in text. The generously sized uppercase has a swash flavor to it yet works harmoniously with itself. This OpenType font has extra ligatures and the extended character set supports Central Europe.

Designed by Jochen Hasinger of Frankfurt, Germany, Covent BT is an unconventional geometric sans serif typeface, featuring rounded terminal ends and a stencil-like break of the contour in some glyphs. At first glance you might think of it as a display typeface, but the generous x-height and openness of the lowercase makes Covent BT very legible at text sizes. Central Europe and Cyrillic is supported in the extended glyph set. Each weight contains 485 glyphs and includes some alternate figures, some upper and lowercase alternates, as well as others, all accessible via OpenType features. Covent BT Symbols is a stylized geometric symbol font, intended to stand alone or used as a companion to the Covent BT typefaces. The array of glyphs covers many of the more popular icons of the day including symbols for web use, numbers, sports, travel and astrology, to name a few, each with its own unique stylized interpretation.

Roundhand was created by Matthew Carter in 1966 on the basis of handwriting by Charles Snell, an English calligrapher of XVII-XVIII known in particular by his "The Pen-man's Treasury Open'd" written in 1694. The typeface has continuous cursive shapes with oval aspect, high contrast emphasized by abrupt transitions from thin to thick and regularity of slope. Its capitals are often used as initials in combinations with other typefaces. The current digital version of the typeface has 3 styles of different weights. Roundhand is clear and easy to read and is well-suited for medium size texts and headlines. It will work well in invitations, menus, packaging, and advertising accentuating elegance and the subtle nature of the content. The Cyrillic version was developed by Vladimir Yefimov and Isabella Chaeva. Released by ParaType in 2013.

Boris Mahovac has adapted a friend’s handwriting in this new font called Kloi (pronounced Chlo – ee). It has a very casual feel and includes alternative swash glyphs of some key characters as well as some extra ligatures. Taking advantage of the ligature and contextual swash features in OpenType, the alternate glyphs automatically replace the standard glyphs when appropriate, creating a very unique look. Available in PostScript OpenType format, Kloi’s extended glyph set covers the Western and Central European, Baltic and Turkish languages.

Roelandt BT is another beautiful script font drawn by calligrapher Rob Leuschke. Perfect for informal invitations and documents, the standard semi-connecting glyphs are simple, yet elegant. An OpenType font, Roelandt also contains a set of Swash characters. Using the OT Swash feature to access these alternate glyphs, you can quickly transform your text into a stylish and more formal presentation complete with generously sized uppercase swashes. Basic and alternative glyphs in the font support Central Europe.

Nevia BT is a four weight text family loaded with subtle design nuances. These OpenType Pro fonts support many OT features including smallcaps, oldstyle figures, contextual swashes, ornaments, discretionary ligatures, fractions and much more. The extended character set supports both Western European and Central European languages.

Based on an engravers’ pattern plate, this outline form deriving from an English roundhand was fitted to linecasting matrices by Intertype about 1940.

Indoo is a modular geometric design that owes much to the typeface designs of Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) and the De Stijl principles of abstraction, simplicity, clarity and harmony. That inspiration, combined with the lettering of signage often found in the Indian quarter of Paris, led to the connecting block letter motif of Indoo. The text fonts are joined by a common horizontal stroke positioned at the baseline. There is an accompanying Ornament font for building borders that includes various stylized fleurons and the like. Each font has a drop shadow companion that allows you to build three-dimensional and multi-colored lettering.

A personal calligraphic series commissioned by Bitstream from Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. Although Carmina BT is a neutral design, optimized for use in digital publishing, Zapf von Hesse’s unique calligraphic spirit is still quite visible in the family’s letterforms. This is not surprising, as all of Zapf von Hesse’s typefaces are calligraphic in nature. Yet Carmina BT is suitable for almost any conceivable digital text application, from book design up through signage use.

Arkeo BT is designer Brian Sooy's first typeface family published by Bitstream. Given very few design elements to work with, Brian has designed a bitmap font that is unique and very readable. There are three widths, Condensed, Regular and Extended. In our opinion, pixels never looked so good. Arkeo performs equally well on screen and as on paper. The OpenType versions include an extended character set featuring oldstyle figures, fractions and additional f-ligatures. Design was begun in late 2001 and completed in 2002. Sooy asked Bitstream to critique, which we did gladly. We also added additional characters for OpenType. This included alternate figure set, an extended set of fractions and additional f-ligatures. Sooy used preliminary versions for setting parts of the TypeCon 2002 material and website.

Futura is the fully developed prototype of the twentieth century Geometric Sanserif. The form is ancient, Greek capitals being inscribed by the Cretans twenty-five hundred years ago at the time of Pythagoras in the Gortyn Code, by the Imperial Romans, notably in the tomb of the Scipios, by classical revival architects in eighteenth century London, which formed the basis for Caslon’s first sanserif typeface in 1817. Some aspects of the Geometric sanserif survived in the flood of Gothics that followed, particularly in the work of Vincent Figgins. In 1927, stimulated by the Bauhaus experiments in geometric form and the Ludwig & Mayer typeface Erbar, Paul Renner sketched a set of Bauhaus forms; working from these, the professional letter design office at Bauer reinvented the sanserif based on strokes of even weight, perfect circles and isosceles triangles and brought the Universal Alphabet and Erbar to their definitive typographic form. Futura became the most popular sanserif of the middle years of the twentieth century. Ironically, given its generic past, Futura is the only typeface to have been granted registration under copyright as an original work of art, and, further irony, given the key part played by the Bauer letter design office, the full copyright belongs to Renner and his heirs. This decision in a Frankfurt court implies that a further small group of older typefaces may also be covered by copyright in Germany, particularly those designed for Stempel by Hermann Zapf. This situation appears to be limited to this small group of faces in this one country, although protection of designers’ rights in newer typefaces is now possible in France and Germany through legislation deriving from the 1973 Vienna Treaty for the protection of typefaces. Mergenthaler’s Spartan is a close copy of Futura; Ludlow’s Tempo is less close. Functional yet friendly, logical yet not overintellectual, German yet anti-Nazi... with hindsight the choice of Futura as Volkswagen’s ad font since the 1960s looks inevitable.

Charles Gibbons' Fleischman BT Pro revives J.M. Fleischman's quirky and elegant text faces of the 1730s. Born in Germany, Fleischman worked in Holland, primarily at Enschedé en Zonen where he cut dozens of faces. His types represent some of the earliest examples of the Transitional style, predating and influencing the work of Fournier, Baskerville, and Bodoni. They were wildly popular in their day, used for everything from newspapers to currency, and Fleischman himself has enjoyed a renaissance of late. Fleischman BT Pro preserves the feel of the printed metal types while expanding the original to include four OpenType fonts: roman, italic, bold, and bold italic. They all include small caps, old style and lining figures, discretionary and historical ligatures, ornaments, and superiors. Fleischman Pro also supports Western, Central European, and Eastern European languages.

Cooper Black, commissioned by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, is the best known of Oswald Cooper’s typefaces. Bitstream has expanded the 1921 original into a complete series of round-edged text faces.

Allen Zuk has designed this wacky typeface that he calls KOOKY. Each character has three variants that bounce about the baseline. The effect is a randomly casual appearance that is great for headlines. The OpenType version does this automatically by using contextual alternates in applications that recognize this option.

Eroxion was designed by Eduardo Manso in 1997. It is a good example of degenerative typographic design, borrowing from techniques first explored in the early 1990s by the designers at Letterror.