Font talk

Feral Feline said:
As if I didn't have enough to worry about excluding/including stuff in my pedal builds — white-washers, neat wiring, perfectly conical solder-joints with even level clipped leads — now you lot are telling me I've gotta manually tweak the keming and ligapertures in my Comic Sans labelling ... ?
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Yes and don't even think about using Algerian
 
Let’s talk (non ECAD built-in) PCB silkscreen fonts.

I’ve been using Whyte Inktrap (https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/96009/abc-whyte-inktrap) for about a year now. Gives IMHO nice readability at small point sizes - maybe down to 2 or 3pt.

But the silkscreen print quality at JLC seems to have gone down a bit (coincidentally just as they started to over “high definition” silkscreen printing) so I’m open to alternatives.

I know there are some typefaces designed specifically for readability at small point sizes (ie, Gortex FKA Grotex: https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/139915/gortex, Helvetica Now’s Micro sub-family) but I’m unfamiliar with many of them. HVNM was my go to for a while but is wider than Whyte Inktrap. Gortex is lighter weight than I’d like for PCBs.

I forget exactly why I started using the non built in vector font in DipTrace but I’m sure it was one of or all of these reasons:
- slashed zero easy to misread as 8, and not needed as there is no real place on a PCB needed to distinguish between the letter O and number 0
- other numeric readability issues (similarities between 5, 6 and 8 are exacerbated at small point sizes / print quality)
- no µ glyph support
 
Anyone have some favorite font families that include glyphs for Greek, Japanese, or Korean characters? Doesn’t need to be all, but I have a lot of designs that incorporate Greek glyphs and a few that incorporate Japanese glyphs where I’d like stylistic consistency between the Latin and non-Latin characters in the design. No immediate plans for any korean text in pedals, but If there are any font families that have both Korean and Latin character support I’d be interested to see what y’all dig since it could be interesting down the line
 
Ampeg SVT front panel. What font is it?
It looks like Eurostile or Microgramma only slightly compressed?


1710165602442.png

Here's a comparison. Bass: top row - original font, middle row - rescaled horizontally Eurostile, bottom row - Eurostile without modifications.

1710166282054.png
 
benny_profane said:
That looks right to me. There seems to be some vertical compression along with the horizontal though. Have you tried Eurostile Compact Bold Condensed? Microgramma doesn’t have lowercase btw.
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I've tried Eurostile Bold Condensed - the letters are too thick. Here in the example above I have Eurostile LT Std Extended 2 with a 0.2mm outline.
I know it doesn't have lowercase letters, but Microgramma D Extended does.
 
temol said:
I've tried Eurostile Bold Condensed - the letters are too thick. Here in the example above I have Eurostile LT Std Extended 2 with a 0.2mm outline.
I know it doesn't have lowercase letters, but Microgramma D Extended does.
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Gotcha. Good point about the weight. Give Std Condensed a shot if you have it. The extended is stretched out and what you’re essentially working against with the horizontal resizing.
 
I have Eurostile with a Condensed weight. Thinking about production: Could be that with either an outline for readability at that point size or a bit of silkscreen doit gain/bleed, even though it's on metal, not paper…

Sorry it's on my old Mac Pro as a PostScript font, so I'd have to FontForge it to work on a modern machine.

Original top
Added a tad of stroke bottom

No scaling

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Thank you so much @Big Monk @temol @KR Sound !!!

Edit:

While Descant fits my needs for just one word on a pedal, here's some background that I found while reading up on it, for posterity and anyone interested:

Descant is a digitization of Tedesca, which you might recognize from this iconic Marvin Gaye album cover. I think that's why it seemed like it was on the tip of my tongue.

1710336695606.png

There's a few other digitizations of Tedesca. Peter Wiegel's Germanica (which can be downloaded from his website) is one. For the 50th anniversary of What's Going On, Fort Foundry was commissioned to do a full revival, Pentz (fontsinuse, fortfoundry's page) which is available on Adobe Fonts.
 
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