RoundHead TG

[Barbara B]

We are pleased to announce the release of RoundHead TG which was lovingly crafted by forum members Michele, Christime, Larry, Bill, Mike, Fred, Gary, and Frances. Great work team!

The RoundHead TG Typeface is an antique sans serif headline font based on a historic 1883 typeface by The MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan Co. called Roundhead. Using images of Roundhead from the specimin sheet catalog (http://archive.org/details/specimensofprint00mackrich page252)for guidance, members of the Fonts and Typography Group at TalkGraphics.com, used Xara Designer software to draw the characters as well as some new characters and alternates. To create the digital typefaces the drawings were imported into FontLab.

This font if free to use on all personal and commercial work. The group has released RoundHead TG under SILOpen Font License version 1.1.

Take a look at this lovely font.




Download:

RoundheadTG.zip (TrueType Only)
File verification hashes:
CRC32: 3E5841BD
MD5: 7391ABCFFDB23111E511B3DE0542297C
SHA-1: F4A0E15A9C616AB1082BB2B96CD723E8E4A1D28A

RoundheadTG-ttf-and-otf.zip(TrueType and OpenType)
File verification hashes:
CRC32: 5960AF9A
MD5: DE92781FFDCDCA47EB4E7992BAC6128C
SHA-1: A3F5BBF2501F0E94D39DA4FBED82824093D3C81D

RoundHead TG-Keyfinder.pdf
File verification hashes:CRC32: 9C47A1E6
MD5: D00D49B78F4B318BE61AFD587AB53015
SHA-1: 25940D2FBE5A66DA94DDBBB4652909FD29DE1296

[gracehjs]

Thank you all.

[Gare]

My own contribution was trivial. I truly enjoy this font...already it's proven versatile and quite useful.

Thanks to all!

—gary

[angelize]

Thanks Everyone! And Thanks Barbara for posting this up.

[angelize]

Here is something I've been experimenting with. Roundhead is a wonderful font to play around with the mold tool!

[Soquili]

Thanks one and all!

[Soquili]

Thanks everyone.

[handrawn]

thanks everyone

[Boy]

Thank you very much for this generous gift, Font and Typography Group!

As I didn't really understand the difference between .otf and .ttf fonts I was researching the web and playing with the two versions in my font manager. I assume that both versions should should render identically but I noticed that in some text examples some of the characters seemed to shift.

To see what was going on I put two identical texts on top of each other in XDP7 and indeed noticed here and there a horizontal shift. I could easily neutralize these shifts by adjusting the kerning but I wonder if this behavior is to be expected or if this is a bug (if that is the right word for a font).

Examples of shifts I noticed are between the 'e' and 'p', the 'a' and 'b' and, especially, the 'r' and ','.

I apologize if I am raising a non-issue...

[Gare]

Hi Boy—

I'm responsible (or irresponsible) for the last pass at coding this group font. If you'd be good enough to do a screen capture and post it or attach it here, I'd love to see what the problem is. Now, the caps and the lowercases do have different baselines, however, there should be a consistency between character height and if there isn't, we're going to take this sucker back to the shop for more work.

Specifically, if you're saying that the TTF and the OTF versions aren't absolutely identical, then there is no alarm.

First, no one is going to use both versions at the same time, or shouldn't or they might be bored. We offer both formats because OTF is becoming the preferred font format—TrueType is an older technology, and some would tell you that the math beneath Trutype is unnecessarily "verbose", and the file sizes are larger than they could be.

Now, I might have done something, but I don't think so; at the last moment, the Administrator realized there was no OTF version in the zip archive, only the TTF. So I did a version lickety-split, but perhaps my lickety was not calibrated last night.

OpenType is a different technology than Truetype, Boy. Adobe and Microsoft worked on it together, and TrueType was a product of Apple and Microsoft. But the relationships only govern the engineers who worked on the technology; it's not political, not a concern to users. Truetype uses Quadratic b-splines to create outline: two control points on the curve, two control points off the curve. Opentype, in addition to being a technology, is also a "coding wrapper"—TrueType or Type 1 paths can be put in an OTF file.

Now, if you can grok that a font is actually a little runtime program that ie executed by our operating system, then you'll appreciate that code is involved when we make a typeface. It's not just a collection of outline and cartoons and stuff. Bill and I and I believe Mike use a product called FontLab, which many will tell you is the logical successor to Fontographer, which almost everyone use 15 years ago to make commercial and private typefaces.

In FontLab, you have about 15 pages of options and data you need to fill out before you can cook the code and the paths to a font format. TrueType has different parameters than OTF, so the conclusion of my answer to you is: the OTF anf TTF versions don't line up and will not line up because Windows handles the font formats ever-so-slightly differently, and TTF and OTF have different font features. Specifically OpenType has more features to exploit.

End of Line ! Sorry, all!

Just enjoy it, boy. It's a way cool collaborative effort!

My Best,

Gary