from Hacker News

Routed Gothic Font

by dector on 2/23/20, 8:01 PM with 57 comments

• by hlieberman on 2/23/20, 11:42 PM

  For a newer font in this vein, I'd look at B612, a font designed in cooperation with Airbus specifically for visibility inside cockpits: https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/B612-Leafl...

• by ginko on 2/24/20, 9:38 AM

  Sort of related, there's DIN 6776, a German standardized font used for technical drawings:

  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normschrift

  https://www.typografie.info/3/uploads/99b804cee64ef8c64ad900...

  I had to learn that one in drafting class in middle school.

• by exmadscientist on 2/23/20, 9:18 PM

  Thank you for posting this! I've been looking off and on for this for ages and ages.

  Trivial factoid: my understanding is that the Gorton pantograph fonts came first, and that the Leroy lettering sets were manufactured using the Gorton fonts. But I don't have a good source for that, so I could be completely wrong.

• by jccalhoun on 2/24/20, 12:38 PM

  If people aren’t familiar with the Leroy Lettering system here is a video of it: https://youtu.be/GZRvQDMBEOE

  This font was also used by EC Comics (their comics included Tales From the Crypt). Here is another font based on that which is more fuzzy: https://caseyburns.com/artwork/font-design/

• by _jal on 2/23/20, 9:38 PM

  I'm pleased to see he implemented the vital U+1F4A9 code point.

• by etaioinshrdlu on 2/23/20, 10:25 PM

  I learned to write in this style by hand in an engineering graphics / drafting class in college.

  I too find the high concentration of upper case fonts, especially Courier New, in engineering and especially EE, to be kind of relaxing and pretty.

• by qwerty456127 on 2/23/20, 9:32 PM

  It's not ugly, it's beautiful.

• by gelo on 2/24/20, 9:07 AM

  It may be the size on the page, or glyph rendering artefact but this font doesnt look... consistent. Dont get me wrong the font is brilliant, however atleast for me there are some points at which the rendered glyphs are over cut. Another way id describe this is the antialiasing is not consistent. Its like layering the same text on top of the other multiple times.

• by reaperducer on 2/23/20, 11:20 PM

  Wow, this is triggering some kind of memory cascade in the back of my brain that I simply cannot place. I know this font, but I really can't say from where.

  The closest guesses I can come up with is the Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide, or maybe an old terminal or computer magazine. But I could easily be wrong.

  Either way, I love it.

• by chewxy on 2/23/20, 11:43 PM

  I like how under unicode coverage, the one emoji that is covered is the poop emoji. Human universals I guess.

• by Dramatize on 2/23/20, 9:16 PM

  I love the feel of this font.

• by uasm on 2/24/20, 6:42 AM

  > "I created this font by purchasing a Leroy Lettering set, using Inkscape to trace the scanned letterforms of one of its templates, and some FontForge Python scripting."

  How does this work from a copyright/legal perspective?

• by sgt on 2/24/20, 2:39 PM

  This is pretty much the same as Comic Sans, except Comic Sans is a bit more curvy and fun. Routed Gothic is what Comic Sans should have been.

• by Waterluvian on 2/24/20, 12:30 AM

  Related to this one, has anyone identified an equivalent font for what was used in the Apollo CSM and LM cockpits?

• by kccqzy on 2/23/20, 10:47 PM

  Why does it implement just a few of the superscripts, but not all?

• by masswerk on 2/24/20, 12:03 AM

  I've been on the look for this for a long time. Thanks!

• by Gracana on 2/24/20, 4:24 AM

  KiCAD 6's font support can't come soon enough!

• by dim13 on 2/24/20, 11:46 AM

  Would love it in monospace variant.

• by cellular on 2/24/20, 2:54 AM

  Brick Hect would be proud.

• by microcolonel on 2/23/20, 10:25 PM

  An OpenType tabular numbers feature would be a nice addition, for numbers in tables. I think it would mostly be a matter of adding a hook to the 1 like other similarly-proportioned industrial fonts.