notes on Speedo fonts

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

Calligraphic 421 = Codex, designed by Georg Trump, c. 1954

Freehand 575 = Jefferson

Freehand 591 = Bingham Script

Gothic 821 is Block, a rather marvellous bumpy German sans of the early
teens (BX000807)


Orbit-B _may_ be OCR-B (000213)

Staccato 555 is Excoffon's Choc, known from restaurant signage everywhere
(001153)


Arrus is a Bitstream original by Richard Lipton, a Garalde text face, not
one I like.


00594, Shelly Allegro, a Matthew Carter original, is worth looking at for
an elegant, well-implemented script face.


Humanist 970 Bold, 00265, is Adsans Bold, a very curious font, designed
for maximum legibility at 4-3/4 points by Walter Tracy for English Lino in
1959. It is a precursor of Verdana. An extremely useful design for very
small text. Available in Postscript from Lino but not I think from its
licensees such as Adobe.


"Classical Garamond" is Sabon, the tri-format metal font designed in the
1960s by . . . what was his name? Jan Tschichold (sp?) 000972, 000279,
000278, 000277 (curse this irrational numeric system)


Geometric Slabserif 712 is Rockwell, a proportional ancestor of Courier,
000488 is the extra bold; see related numbers for other members of this
family which should not be over-used . . . .


Humanist 521 (THE NUMBER IS ALL-IMPORTANT!!!!) is Eric Gill's celebrated
Gill Sans, the font Peter thinks looks like Arial, which puts him outside
the outside of the pale as far as type appreciation goes -- sorry Peter!;
00293 is the bold italic; 292 is the bold; 291 is the italic; 290 is the
regular.


The only really usable text face here is Sabon, a favorite of Walter Tracy
(see his "Letters of Credit", not cheap, for an excellent, perhaps
definitive look at type), which is set in it.


A person called Porchez has recently redesigned Sabon for Linotype under
the name "Sabon Next" but this of course is not available in Speedo format.


Peter is right that it would be nice to have Century Schoolbook (Bookman
has never been well-revived, and the Bitstream version, which interestingly
comes in a long ascender version, stupidly coded HD for high descender, a
misnomer if ever there was one, does not have a true italic.)


I will ask my friends at Bistream if it is possible to get a nice Century
in Speedo format. Perhaps the best version of all, Ruzicka's Primer from
the 1950s, called Century 751 in Bitstream's nomenclature, and available
only as roman and italic, might be made available, but I doubt it.


Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any way to create Speedo format
fonts effectively, outside of Bitstream's proprietary software. There was a
3d party conversion utility early on but it was not worth using.


Personally, I put all my XyWrite docs that need to be printed nicely into
Quark or even -- ugh -- MS Word.


An incomplete cross reference to Bitstream names is available at

http://jeff.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/jonpastor.txt

Speedo is internally similar to postscript but does not have hints, hence
will never look good on screen.