Writing Machine™ was designed to simulate the characters produced by an antique typewriter. Original typewriters from the 19th century were often referred to as "Letter
Writing Machines". The original scans for these letterforms were taken from the actual imprints made by Grandma's typewriter.
COMPANION FAMILY
If you require more severe character flaws, check out our companion families Double Hitter™, Keystoned™ and Romanstoned™ which have poorly inked ribbon effects, misaligned keys and many cool double-hits.
USING WRITING MACHINE™
To help you get the most out these fonts, here is an overview of the family, along with some suggestions for using the fonts:
a) The Light and Bold versions are just as labelled. The four fonts called
Writing Machine™ Badkeys™ are intermediate versions, because they contain both the light and bold characters--however, the bold and light are applied disproportionately on many characters. Old typewriters often had mechanism problems which prevented the keys from hitting the page squarely. Often the bottom of the key would hit the page a little harder, causing the ribbon to distort the bottoms of the printed letterforms. The Badkeys™ reflect this kind of key action. Characters which are not bolded at the bottom of Badkeys™ One can be found bolded in Badkeys™ Two, and vise versa. Also note that some of the light characters in Badkeys™ are more broken and faded than they are in the
Writing Machine™ Light fonts.
b) For Mac users, when using the automatic bold and italic functions in your page layout or word processing software, Badkeys™ One is the "regular" font, while Badkeys™ OneOblique is linked as the "oblique", Badkeys™ Two is the "bold" and Badkeys™ TwoOblique is the "bold oblique".
c) For PC users, naming limitations for PC fonts resulted in the Light and LightOblique fonts being renamed as the Regular and Oblique, and a separate family called
Writing Machine Badkeys™ had to be created, with the One, OneOblique, Two and TwoOblique being replaced by the Regular, Oblique, Bold and BoldOblique font names, respectively.
d) Depending on the words you are setting and the point size you are setting them in, you may want to mix characters from all the families. By alternating characters from the Regular and the Bold fonts you can achieve some interesting effects. You can do this for duplicate characters that appear in the same words, or you can do a full search and replace for particular characters using your layout software. The alternation between the Regular and Bold fonts further enhances the grunge effect. Also note that some of the accented vowel characters are different from their root characters, and can be used as alternates by masking the accents.
e) To further create interesting effects with this font, you might try alternating the upper and lower case characters. Replacing the uppercase vowels with lowercase characters can look particularly effective.
EXTRA CHARACTERS
Writing Machine™ and Keystoned™ families both have 241 printable characters per font (almost all of them unique from font to font). These characters include 6 fraction characters, some taken from the original typewriter keys. For PC users, these fractions can be accessed by using the following keyboard commands:
one half = alt-0189
one quarter = alt-0188
three quarters = alt-0190
one superior = alt-0185
two superior = alt-0178
three superior = alt-0179
Because North American Mac users cannot access these special characters without the using special software, an extra font called
Writing Machine™ Fractions has been included in both the Mac Type 1 and Mac Truetype families. This font contains all of the different fractions contained in the other
Writing Machine™ fonts, PLUS the ones from Keystoned™. Twenty extra fractions (ten versions of "one third" & "two thirds") have also been included in the set. For instant visual access to these characters, be sure to print out the last page of the PDF file called "Vowel Variations", available for download from our website.
FULL CHARACTER SET
Each font in the
Writing Machine™ family has a full character set of 232+ letterforms, with all characters designed in the style of the font.
File Size: 19.73 MB
Release date: October 12, 2012
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
- Website publishing: create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
- PDFs: embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
- Video and broadcast: use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content and more
- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)
Download nowDesigner: TypeArt
