Font Forum

I am studying the Centaur font, which is based upon a typeface used by Nicolas Jenson in the 1470s in Venice.

The following is a large, somewhat over 2 Megabyte pdf document which is set in the Centaur typeface, that being stated on page 3 of the pdf document.

http://www.loc.gov/about/books/guides/pdfs/MBRS.pdf

If one goes to http://www.fonts.com/ and clicks on the current link in the Type Trading Cards part of the Articles section at the lower right of the page, then on that page are links to various Type Trading Cards which are available from the http://www.fonts.com/ webspace.

There is one which includes Centaur.

There is a link to Centaur on the http://www.fonts.com/FindFonts/HiddenGems/ web page.

http://www.fonts.com/FindFonts/HiddenGems/Centaur.htm

Searching for Centaur at http://www.itcfonts.com and http://www.fonts.com leads to specimens of the fonts which are available for purchase.

Incidentally, in passing, I mention that the http://www.itcfonts.com webspace also has Type Trading Cards.

William Overington

8 February 2007

I have just found this web page.

http://harvardmagazine.com/on-line/090657.html

William

Some readers might like to have a look at the following document which I have produced which uses the Centaur font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/m ... e_idea.PDF

An interesting point is that the desktop publishing package which I used, namely Serif PagePlus 10, will only embed characters with Unicode codepoints up to U+00FF in a pdf: glyphs of characters of U+0100 and beyond get converted to curves. In this pdf the glyph of an fi ligature, which is at U+F001 in the Private Use Area in the version of the font being used, is converted to curves and adds quite a byte overhead to the document. So, in the event, I used the fi ligature in the design example on page 2, where it is used twice, yet not in the text on page 1, where it would have been used eight times.

The content of the document relates to interactive television infrastructure and thus is perhaps mostly of interest in that specialist area of interest, yet hopefully the document will also be of interest in this forum with regard to the typographical and design aspects of the document.

William