Bitstream Charter

[phoenixenero]

Char­ter was de­signed by Matthew Carter in 1987 as a body text font that would hold up well on low-res­o­lu­tion out­put de­vices of the day—fax ma­chines and 300 dpi laser printers.

While 300 dpi print­ing is long gone, most of to­day’s com­puter dis­plays op­er­ate far be­low 300 dpi. Char­ter, un­sur­pris­ingly, holds up ad­mirably well as a screen font. (Matthew would go on to de­sign the quin­tes­sen­tial screen fonts Ver­dana and Geor­gia for Microsoft.)

In 1992, Bit­stream con­tributed Post­Script ver­sions of the ba­sic Char­ter fam­ily to the X Con­sor­tium. These orig­i­nal files are still avail­able and can be freely down­loaded and mod­i­fied. But they can be hard to find. So I tracked them down and con­verted them into a new pack­age of OTFs, TTFs, and webfonts.

Why? Be­cause Char­ter is a great font, and eas­ily one of the best free fonts avail­able. So I’m do­ing what I can to put more Char­ter into the world. If your project de­mands a font with­out li­cens­ing re­stric­tions, con­sider it.

Source: practicaltypography.com

[alfredxing]

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