Font Friday: A Tale of Three Fonts, Part I

I'm not sure how many of you have read my biography close enough to realize my past in the font industry. It was the early 90s and the digital font industry was very young. I was in charge of technical support for The Font Company and we offered over 2000 PostScript fonts for both PC and Mac. Three of the fonts in our library were problematic. There was so much detail in the font characters that we couldn't make them into a PostScript Type 1 font (the typical PostScript font in use today) without removing detail. I'm going to cover each of these fonts in the blog. No, they aren't free. But you might find something similar for free and you will find a variation of today's font included with most versions of CorelDRAW.

First up is Mistral. CorelDRAW users may know it as Staccato 222 BT. I'm showing the ITC version of the font, though the one closest to what The Font Company offered is the URW version.

The idea is that it represents casual writing done with a felt-tip pen. Go ahead and write some text yourself with a pen and look carefully. Notice the really rough edges of the characters? That is what made this font so complex. Luckily the OpenType format allows for more complex data and the font has been made available with all of the detail included.

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