This is a special font for use creating US Postal Service "Intelligent Mail" barcodes. Those are the barcodes you see on most cards and envelopes. Commercial mailers get the best pricing by printing barcodes when they address the mail, saving the Postal Service a step. The barcodes are also used on reply mail and Share mail, and for "Informed Visibility" tracking. Software to create these barcodes, including the USPS Intelligent Mail Small Business (IMsB) tool, typically provide an output of 65 characters, each character being an A, D, T or F, corresponding to each of the styles of bar. SmartBars 12 replaces those characters with the corresponding bar. When doing a mail merge to print addresses, the user would set the barcode field on their merge template to be printed using SmartBars 12, at 12 point, regular, and the barcode will print with the correct bars and at the required size to meet USPS requirements.

The dearJoe series of fonts came to life around the year 1999, when I created dearJoe 1, which was a first (and half-assed) attempt to convert my own handwriting into a working font. Being able to type in my own hand had always been a childhood fantasy, and even though I only partly understood the software, a working font was generated and I decided to put it on the internet for people to use in their own personal projects. Which they did: at this moment the dearJoe 1 font has been downloaded millions of times and can be found on Vietnamese riksjas, Tasmanian gyms and chocolate stores on 5th Avenue for instance. The font is not something I am particularly proud of, but it started me of in building what's now the JOEBOB graphics foundry. Inbetween creating other fonts, the dearJoe series has become a theme I revisit every once in a while, trying to create an update on how my handwriting has evolved, along with my abilities in creating fonts that mimic actual handwriting. In the last decade or so I started implementing ligatures and alternate characters, which helped a lot in coming to a result that can almost pass for actual handwriting. The 2019 dearJoe 7 font is the latest addition to this font family. All characters were scanned from handwritten notes, cherrypicking the characters and letter-combinations I liked best. They were written with a Lamy M66 B pen and only minor adjustments were made to the original scans, leaving most little flaws and rough edges as they were for a convincing ball-point on paper result. The font comes with over 150 ligatures, making sure the font has a variated and credible overall look and feel.