The hardest working font in Manhattan | Hacker News Reader

The hardest working font in Manhattan

aresluna.org

857 pointsrobinhouston118 comments

It's a long time since I thought about doing Leroy lettering, so I was delighted to see the tiny clip of someone doing that. My thoughts on Leroy were a bit divided, I have to say.

When I was young we were first taught how to letter by hand, so when we were allowed to use Leroy, it felt a lot like cheating. I suppose it was great that perfect results were easy to achieve, but replacing skill with pattern-following was not necessarily an improvement.

To this day, I linger over old research articles that have maps and graphs that had been lettered by hand. Many papers written in the 1800s have beautifully clear line drawings of apparatus that can be much more useful than the photos included in newer papers.

Leroy sets was something that would set my dad off on a rant of his struggles with a Leroy lettering set. These would come on in quiet moments of contemplation. When I entered design school his first question was regarding Leroy lettering. We were the first class to go through the curriculum with a Macintosh lab and I never used a Leroy set.

Yes and: Lettering guides (sort of) allowed multiple people to maintain drawings. Even then, individual skill and technique allowed team mates to recognize each other's work.

I knew one person who had perfect hand lettering. And could mimick other people's lettering. Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead. (They hand lettered their own liner notes, natch.)

Source: I was a truly terrible draughtsman.

> Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead.

Neil Caffrey would be proud!

I've seen this font everywhere for my whole life and never looked into it's history. It's a fascinating account and I'm glad Marcin wrote it down.

Emotionally, what I feel when I see text using it is: "This information is serious and if you don't pay attention to what this says someone could get hurt"

There's nothing playful about it at all, which makes sense in how it was used for industrial controls, military signage, elevators, and the like.

And yet, according to the author, it has some quirks.

The idea is that the font itself is not particularly serious, but we are used to see it in serious contexts, so we make the association.

And there is also the support, when some text is engraved on metal, there is some permanence to it, some commitment. The one who wrote this really means it. It is not like a sheet of paper, or worse, a computer screen where everything can vanish at the push of a button.

I think the titles summarizes it perfectly. It means hard work. When we see this, we imagine industrial machinery and professionals, because that's where it is used. In an alternative world where Comic Sans would be used for this purpose, it would be seen as serious.

For a time I wrote code for BMS/BAS systems for many prominent commercial buildings in the NYC area, control rooms in basements and on rooftops and all the secret in-between rooms, in-between. (A fascinating job not without its exposure to asbestos, among other hazards.)

And, as someone born and raised in the south, I was thoroughly enamored with this ubiquitous font that implied the seriousness and purpose of each control implement, to include the priority of the functionality said implement represented, on countless panels I engaged with.

This deep dive was pleasing to my soul and I'm immensely thankful to the author for taking the time (and the photos) to indulge in traversing this wormhole for us.

I'm afraid the author has it backwards. This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.

This is just how you used to be taught to do lettering in a drafting class. The straight lines and simple shapes make it easy to do lettering with pencil or a pen, which is also why all the lines are the same width and all the line caps are rounded.

Later on these turned into stencils, which let users do lettering quickly by tracing the pen inside the stencil - and then turned into fonts for use in print. But all that came later. What we have here is just lettering people learned in drafting classes, and which was later used to make stencils and templates.

> The straight lines and simple shapes make it easy to do lettering with pencil or a pe

I'm guessing these letters are also easy to create with a CNC machine.

(Now that the page has loaded I see he identifies engraving machines.)

You need to actually read the article before commenting.

Nah, I just tried and it works fine.

I did...?

The article goes into almost tedious detail about where it came from, and whether it constitutes a "proper" font. I think you may have skimmed too fast.

That's an assumption, I read it just fine. :) I just disagree with how the author keeps talking about draftsman's lettering as if it were some company's font (e.g. Gorton and Leroy) rather than a commonly taught community standard.

They do later talk about the real origin in 1894 in England, with TT&H creating it due to the constraints of their self-built lettering machine to engrave tiny letters on their products

As I mention in a previous comment [1], this style of hand lettering was common in textbooks prior to 1894. From 1883, for example, we find this specimen in Standard Lettering, published by the Columbia School of Drafting:

https://archive.org/details/standardletterin00claf/page/42/m...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055792

And again, the article explicitly mentions that, with a picture of a similar book:

> I don’t know how this first proto-Gorton was designed – unfortunately, Taylor, Taylor & Hobson’s history seems sparse and despite personal travels to U.K. archives, I haven’t found anything interesting – but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font.

The issue is that the author presents the entire set of typefaces that are similar to Gorton as derived from Gorton without presenting evidence to rule out the obvious alternative lineage: that, just like genuine Gorton, they too were derived from the various regional single-stroke letterforms that draftsman everywhere were taught and used. Excellent draftsman’s examples abounded and would have been so much more common than genuine Gorton and its genuine ancestors that it’s hard to believe that regional companies marketing their own type engraving machines would have had to copy Gorton rather than local examples of the draftsman’s art that were considered superior.

The article has a link to the licensing agreement between Taylor Hobson and Gorton, links to other posts explaining how Leroy bought Gorton machines, an interactive comparison where you can see the similarity of the letters, and dozens of photos and scans of docs where you can compare them yourself, too. I would say that is a lot of evidence presented.

But that evidence is not persuasive that the set of fonts that the author calls Gorton are actually derived from the lineage he presents (see the diagram captioned “The Gorton quasisuperfamily”), rather than from freehand lettering that would have been much more widely used at the time. Remember that the letterforms themselves could not qualify for legal protection in the United States. So none of the licensing agreements offered as evidence were needed to acquire the fonts. So we can conclude that they were executed to acquire the machines and the patents behind them for the purpose of introducing similar machines in a new market. The machine designs and methods of production were the hard part. The fonts were comparatively trivial to create and incorporate into a machine, whatever its design.

The author's comparison of the fonts actually argues against them being of the claimed lineage. Consider the many differences between the Taylor, Taylor & Hobson machine’s fonts and the Gorton machine’s fonts. If Gorton had a license to use the Hobson machine designs, which they did, they could have simply copied the TT&H fonts verbatim. But they clearly did not. Why not? I think it's likely that they simply preferred a different design, one closer to the letterforms that were more commonly used by draftsmen in the American market. In other words, the Gorton reference design was not the TT&H font design.

At least, that's my best guess based on the evidence presented.

This quote is where the author seems to reach the conclusion they want, that is Gorton being the Proto-Indo-European of these drafting letterforms:

> Each of these reappearances made small changes to the shapes of some letters. Leroy’s ampersand was a departure from Gorton’s. Others softened the middle of the digit 3, and Wrico got rid of its distinctive shape altogether. Sometimes the tail of the Q got straightened, the other times K cleaned up. Punctuation – commas, quotes, question marks – was almost always redone. But even without hunting down the proof confirming the purchase of a Gorton’s pantograph or a Leroy template set as a starting point, the lineage of its lines was obvious. (The remixes riffed off of Gorton Condensed or the normal, squareish edition… and at times both. The extended version – not that popular to begin with – was often skipped.)

As a child, I have learned lettering based on the German DIN standards (DIN 16, DIN 17, DIN 1451).

While these standards date from around 1930, they were based on much older lettering textbooks. The oldest that I have seen was from 1871, and these German textbooks did not differ much from the American textbooks quoted above.

I just read the article in full, and don't understand your point, either.

Maybe you could explain what part of the comment you replied to you think is either wrong or already covered by the article, so that either we can realise what we failed to notice in our first reading or so someone can explain to you why you're wrong in thinking that comment isn't correct in the context of having read the full article :)

I'm sure it started as an oral tradition based on legibility. The communicating new ideas about physical objects on paper is difficult and I was taught that is was a lesson on clarity. Codifying best practices is what cultures do as they evolve.

While I can appreciate the parent commenter's criticism, I think the author tried to head it off with this concession of their chosen naming convention:

> In the end, I’m sticking with Gorton for the whole branch since that feels the most well-known name, but I feel ill-equipped to make that call for everyone. You might choose to call it Gorton, Leroy, TT&H, Taylor-Hobson, or one of the many other names. (Just, ideally, not Linetica.)

Since the author was concentrated on the particular letterforms that seemed more consistent in the lineage observed, the usage makes sense. But that naming, even with the acknowledgement that it likely comes from the standards of drafting of the day:

> This was perhaps the first modern pantograph engraver, and perhaps even the arrival of a concept of an engraving font – the first time technical writing was able to be replicated consistently via the aid of the machine.

But it also seems a reasonable critique of the article that it's mislabeling to call the MIL-SPEC-33558 and ANSI Y14.2M or even the WWII equipment lettering "Gorton" simply by visual similarity without evidence to show ancestry to the specific engraving machines, dies, or letter sets of Gorton/TTH/etc. And that is also done throughout both with direct evidence and without.

Read it again then, because all of these are discussed in the article.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42688981>

Yeah -- my dad's lettering template had letterforms like this. As the article mentions, the Simplex characters from the Hershey set, used in CAD applications, are based on this font, probably for consistency with how drafting was traditionally done.

I think it's worth calling a font when there were likely cases of the font being transmitted, by copying from one source to another. E.G. Gorton being made by machines licensed from another company, then the output of those machines being used for lettering guides.

I think you're right.

I also believe that it's more likely that the font was informed by what was commonly taught as good lettering for technical drawings in that era.

For example, consider the one-stroke gothic lettering in 1883's Standard Lettering, published by the Columbia School of Drafting:

https://archive.org/details/standardletterin00claf/page/42/m...

And here's A TEXT-BOOK OF FREE-HAND LETTERING, part of the TECHNICAL DRAWING SERIES, first published in 1895:

https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...

Consider the "single-stroke lettering" suggested in that texbook:

https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...

Also consider the model forms for pre-penciled gothic lettering:

https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...

It seems that such lettering was already common when the machines were introduced to produce similar lettering.

The 3 with a flat top is a "banker's 3", an anti-forgery measure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3

Playing cards use this style of lettering. Not sure how far back that goes but I kind of doubt they all derive from Gorton's specific engraving machines.

Down the rabbit hole I go….

And used on eg German license plates, for at least partly that reason (IIUC).

Ah, that makes sense! Thanks for this insight!

> And here's A TEXT-BOOK OF FREE-HAND LETTERING, part of the TECHNICAL DRAWING SERIES, first published in 1895:

Called out in the article - "but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font. [photograph captioned: From a 1895 “Free-hand lettering” book by Frank T. Daniels]"

I know it was a long essay and I skimmed most of it myself. But the author definitely mentions this and even has a picture from the 1895 book you linked to.

> This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.

TFA doesn't suggest that, at all. A font is a concrete instantiation of a writing style, and TFA is about the history of one such concrete instance - not the general style it's an instance of. Also the connection to drafting and lettering stencils is discussed in some detail midway through.

(Also more generally: kind of amazing to imagine reading an article of this depth, that mentions years of obsessive research and links to the author's 1200-page book on the history of typing, and thinking: "yeah this guy probably doesn't know about drafting".)

Of course I read the details on stencils and patterns in the text. But you misunderstand what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that there are many "concrete instantiations" of drafting lettering style, that all look basically the same, because they all came from the same source, and Gorton is just one of them. So what we're seeing in elevators and on plaques is not "Gorton" specifically. While in contrast we do see Helvetica specifically on NYC subway signs, Johnston in the London tube, etc.

Too fine of a point? Perhaps. And also, it doesn't take away from the quality of the essay which is a delightful romp through the history of draftman's lettering showing up in all sorts of forgotten utilitarian places.

(But I've got to ask - what's with the ad hominem at the end? We should be above that.)

> What I'm saying is that there are many "concrete instantiations" of drafting lettering style, that all look basically the same, because they all came from the same source, and Gorton is just one of them.

Open a couple of old drafting lettering guides (e.g. ones linked in sibling comments or TFA), and look closely. They'll obviously have a similar overall vibe, but there'll be tons of variations - differently shaped 3/4/7, where the curves start and stop on letters like CJGS569, whether the various corners are pointed or rounded or flattened, etc.

If your premise above is true, then we'd expect to see similar sorts of variations in the various fonts derived from drafting style, and TFA's entire point is that the author has collected hundreds of cases where we don't. Check his photos - they show the same font with the same idiosyncrasies, the off-balance G, two flattened points on the 4, the slightly asymmetric 8, etc. TFA is about the ubiquity of that specific set of letter shapes (modulo some variations that he discusses), not just of lettering that's generally in the drafting style.

(Also: in the best of faith and not meant as shade, you might want to look up "ad-hominem".)

> If your premise above is true, then we'd expect to see similar sorts of variations in the various fonts derived from drafting style

If you look at the photos in the article, there are a lot of variations! For example, in the article, if you look at the first two sets of photos of keyboards, you see a variety of shapes, especially visible with the 6s/9s, 0s, Rs, Ss, etc. And then in the next set of photos (the ones with a selection of plaques), you again see a collection of various letter shapes - look at the varying shapes of Gs, Ss, etc. This repeats throughout, when you look at the random assortments of plates and signage.

Later on, after he discusses ANSI and DIN standards, the author goes on to say:

> In the regulatory space, the U.S. military canonized Gorton in 1968 as a standard called MIL-SPEC-33558 for aircraft and other equipment dials, cancelled it in 1998… then brought it back again in 2007.

Except that the specimens he shows right below, of ANSI Y14 and MS 33558 (and whatever the third one is), are very different from Gorton and even from each other - just look at those letter forms. Which makes sense, as their lineage is _not_ from Gorton, but from traditional lettering.

So that's what I mean - it's not that Gorton _specifically_ is everywhere, it's just that draftman's lettering style is everywhere, and in many variants, including the very popular Gorton one.

I saw the argument more as: Gorton begat Leroy and that became the defacto technical drawing standard through the widespread adoption of drawing templates. The differences between Leroy and the standards you mentioned seem very small to me.

After reading such a beautiful piece about an interesting topic and researched for hundreds of miles on end, I can rest assured that somebody on HN knows better. No doubts, no nothing... "just" knows it better.

Edit: The above might sound too harsh, sorry. You're probably right, but after reading such a beautiful piece, your reaction was really a buzzkill for me.

> The above might sound too harsh, sorry.

Perfectly accurate though.

I learned that style of writing in school (German: Normschrift). I think this is where the origins of the font lie, but having read the article I don't see how the author is wrong here.

This is just a thing they failed to emphasize — maybe — considering the credentials, because it was blaringly obvious to them.

This feels more like a detrctive story about figuring out the origins of one concrete manifestation of a font and not a text about where that family of fonts comes from.

This was also pointed out in the article, but the point at which it became a physical standard, and not a lettering style, was with the Gorton engravers.

(The tail of the Q is a tell -- not a straight line, not a simple shape, but identical in lettering systems based on the engravers.)

Also, 7 usually has a straight line in technical lettering, but in Gorton is curved in a specific way.

Thank you so much for writing this. I am a solo game developer working on a vintage-styled spacecraft simulator, tearing his hair out over the cockpit typeface problem. I recognized the classic Apollo spacecraft from the sign engraving tools I'd seen in use on the job about 40 years ago, but I couldn't figure out the name for it or identify a font that recreated it properly.

Add this to the list of wonderful things I never expected to wake up to on HN!

Came for the typography geek-out, stayed for the machine tools and ANSI Y14 refs.

Had no idea the rabbit hole went this deep. Work with CAD standards and on my to-do list is adding rendering for IFC text notes to a GL application and was wondering what default font to use. Haven't checked STEP yet, but IGES defined a special font code (FC2) for "LeRoy", so these things percolate through technology like the apocryphal Roman Cart/Railroad Gauge story!

I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial. As a late gen-Xer, nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous. They were just as common and valid as standard printed forms.

I suppose it’s something like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.

Again, this isn’t meant to insult anyone, just that it’s really fascinating to see a different generational perspective here.

It’s weird to immediately assume it’s a matter of age. Do you have any basis for that?

as another gen-xer i was similarly bemused by the repeated references to the font as ugly, so it did kind of make sense to think that the issue was the author not having grown up with it quite as ubiquitous

Ubiquity has nothing to do with beauty. It is perfectly possible for an individual with taste to find something they deal with frequently to be ugly. Especially if they find a flaw early on and it never goes away.

The author isn't saying he finds the style unfamiliar - the entire article is about how ubiquitous it is. He's a typographer, so I think he means "ugly" in the sense of having features that modern typographers consider to be flaws - e.g. he mentions the off-balance G, being monoline, etc.

Also the author's CV lists working at google from 2006, so he's not exactly a youngster.

I read that "ugly" not as a "what is this yesrerdayish mess, was life in the twntieth really that unrefined?", but as a "technically, it's breaking all the rules", a judgement from typography knowledge, not from generational identity. And I read it as an expression of surprise, because they spent so much time with that ubiquitous type in sight without ever noticing it, until one day they stopped not noticing it. No trace of generational shifts.

If you think that's all they said about it, you didn't finish the article. That was the introduction.

Marcin looks to be perhaps in the same age bracket as you, but with a different context for letter forms. I believe that people with skillsets that are heavily aesthetic driven - all aspects of graphic design included - see things that non designers don't. A lopsided ampersand that wouldn't raise your eyebrow could be considered laughable to a font designer, keming that doesn't bear mentioning a crime against the written form.

I love the casual "If that didn’t bother you before, it will bother you through the rest of this article" thrown in there

Marcin is definitely Gen-X. His LinkedIn says he started his master's degree in 1997. Assuming a typical education that'd put his birth year around 1974. (Note he grew up in Poland, so a different Gen-X experience than from the US.)

Perhaps what you're interpreting as generational perspective is Marcin's analytical perspective as a professional designer. He's got a very keen eye for both historical design and modern. Also I read this post as a sort of fond irony, "look at this unusual and ugly font it's actually a thing of beauty, let me show you."

> I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial.

You could’ve looked him up. He’s not hard to find and definitely not post-millennial. Design director at Figma and previously worked at Medium, Google, and Code for America. Started his master’s in the late 90s.

https://mastodon.online/@mwichary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w

Even if he were, these types of generational comments are trite, like the “only 90s kids will get this” memes. It is naive to assume someone’s age from an opinion; the tapestry of human diversity is considerably more complex than that.

> nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous.

Ubiquity has nothing to do with beauty. You can live with something all your life and still find it ugly. Or you can develop your taste and change your opinion. You can even have nuanced opinions. Like the author, who mentions liking the font after the initial reaction. He called this post “a love letter”.

https://hachyderm.io/@mwichary@mastodon.online/1140043864696...

Look at the length of the post—that is more research on the subject than most of us will ever do. Let’s perhaps give the benefit of the doubt that a long time professional with the passion to do this amount of research has some basis for their views which go beyond when they were born.

> like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.

There are a plethora of reactions to that: “how strange”, “how intriguing”, “how beautiful”, … Most people don’t think every old thing they encounter for the first time is ugly.

I don't know if it's generational or a matter of background. For me, as the sort of person who knows exactly where to find the SCE power switch, it would be impossible to conceive of this font as ugly. So much ingenuity has been expressed, so much craftsmanship given material form, so many feats of industry and exploration and mundane utility accomplished through those shapes that I find them definitively beautiful.

If some community teaches Rules of Beauty which these characters contravene and are thereby deemed ugly, that says more about the merit of such Rules than anything else.

That ampersand, though... okay. You can have that one.

The lower cases letters are certainly ugly as hell, though.

Getting hugged: https://web.archive.org/web/20250214221951/https://aresluna....

The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it. The variety of signage I've seen it on (national parks, placards, industrial applications and schematics) evoke a sense of awe in me.

Agree completely, I quite like the look of the font.

I sometimes feel who are deep in a subject sometimes are too entrenched in their world with rules and guidelines, that to me don't seem all that important to judge quality in the real world; or at least how I perceive things.

Another example also comes from the world of typography: text figures (non-lining numerals). To me they're ugly and difficult to read. Typographers like them because they fit better into the appearance of text, and that's true, but of low importance to me. Numbers are not words, and I feel they don't have to look the same. I like them to look different. I want them to be easy to read, which text figures aren't. (I actually went to the effort of creating custom CSS using Firefox's Stylus add-on to force lining numerals on all websites I visit.)

As a kid (first, maybe second grade) I wrote lining numerals at a time when kids were taught to write numerals all at x-height, for similar reasons.

They did say they like it, despite it breaking so many "rules".

I also like it, in the same way I like DIN even though the author considers DIN to be better designed. I have, like the author, often seen this font when it's carved into metal, and I suppose the fact that it's on metal helps evoke that feeling of industry at its best, like a well oiled machine. I also instinctively associate it with the post-WWII period when technology seemed to be progressing faster than today and when technology was unequivocally a good thing.

> The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it.

“Beauty”, as they say, “is in the eye of the beholder”. It is not a value judgement to call something ugly, but a subjective opinion. And the author does mention they came to appreciate it:

> My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?

> Then, the second thought: I kind of like it.

He's a font nerd. As a font nerd, it's definitely really ugly to me. But art is personal, so if you like it I'm happy for you :)

I get the "ick" when I see terrible typography. I can barely stand to look at American highway signs, it's almost physically painful how horrific they are to me:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MUTCD_Sign_Assembly_...

You'll enjoy Marcin Wichary's work. He recently travelled Australia and found instances of Gorton everywhere.

https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/111700218511462472

https://shifthappens.site/

Aresluna is Marcin :-)

LOL. Really? Presumably there’s a term of art for that.

Ah yeah his name’s right there at the top... :facepalm:

What timing! I'd just worked out* the "stickfont" or "open-path font" or "stroke font" that one of my favorite defunct games rendered with GL_LINE_STRIP, and it seems to be from the Hershey glyph set. If you haven't heard of it, it's a remarkable achievement of one individual contributor, essentially a career engineer applying vector graphic rendering to technical lettering.

http://www.whence.com/hershey-fonts

* with the help of others ^_^

If you liked this article, you might also like this one about a typeface which got tossed into the Thames river:

https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/doves-type-thames-myste...

Does anyone else have cool font/typeface stories?

"In older [keyboards] – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter."

This makes me want an old keyboard. Amazing how hardy keyboards were back then.

you can still get them like that - the search term is "double shot" for using two molds. very popular and durable for custom keycaps.

Brass Mono [0] is a digital alternative to "Gorton".

[0]: https://github.com/fonsecapeter/brass_mono

This is a phenomenal, 6100-word love letter to possibly the world's first industrial typeface.

It was a really great article. A lot of work went into writing that and making it look good too. Peak Internet.

> I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love.

I'm relieved to find I'm not the only person who wanders around photographing the typography.

I only do it to photograph Comic Sans and Papyrus to send as jokes in a family group chat.

> I'm relieved to find I'm not the only person who wanders around photographing the typography.

There are N of us!

A bit of a meta-comment. Something about this piece hits exactly the sweet spot of length and complexity for engaging but still accessible prose, which I feel like has become rarer over time, replaced by the modern writing of instant gratification. (Whether less is being produced, or it's less prominent, or whether the other kinds have become more prominent, I can't say for sure.) I really appreciated it, independent of the subject matter.

Great essay, really enjoyed it! In particular all the beautiful photos!

Typography is a bit of mystery to me. I can somehow recognize "bad" or "strange" fonts, but often I can't put my finger on it. I was immediately put off by the font of the essay, but I kept reading, and right in the middle came the big reveal (spoiler alert):

> (This essay is typeset in a strangely-spaced version of Century put together for Selectric Composer typewriters and recreated for on-screen use. If that didn’t bother you before, it will bother you through the rest of this article.)

Well played!

This is not an ugly font. It’s incredibly legible and IMO the lack of styling is pleasing to the eye.

it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary.

Both of which are objectively desirable qualities of a font with massive control panels as its native habitat.

> it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary

Except for the terrible, terrible ‘0’, which looks more or less identical to the ‘O’. IIRC sometimes similar fonts had a strike-through 0 for legibility; I think the BBC Micro keyboard did, for instance.

The BBC Micro keycaps were made by Comptec (mentioned in the article) in Gorton Modified. Source: I work at signature plastics and have seen the original tooling for it.

Yes it's highly legible at distances, but you'd never want to use it for body text. The letterforms are not well balanced -- e.g. the bowl of the 'R' is uncomfortably high, same with the top half of the 'Y'. It would be tiring to the eye to read long text in.

A lack of styling does not mean a good sense of balance.

It is ugly but highly legible. Which is just fine for the kinds of functional engraving it's meant for.

It's funny seeing Letraset described as popular through the 1960's. They were still available in most stationery stores well into the 1980's at least, and commonly used because they provided better headlines etc. for small newspapers and the like than dot matrix printers for anything you wanted to photocopy rather than sending to have typeset by a professional printer.

This blog post presents the best of Internet

WOW that took a long time to load.

https://i.imgur.com/SsH1DHt.png

Excellent article though.

Where can we download this font?

i took this

https://github.com/dakotafelder/open-gorton

But as anyone who finished the article knows, that's Gorton Modified. Check the 3, 7 and Q.

I finished it - the article, quite a lengthy one. Though I never stated say it's the original Gorton. The Gortons I found were all for sale, this one is open.

https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/

Also links a number of variations.

Another font is “Simplex”, which I think is often still found in CAD products.

You can get Marcin Wichary’s version from https://shifthappens.site/store/

Routed Gothic is a fairly good free version https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/

The national park typeface is another pantograph router style font https://nationalparktypeface.com/

Gorton Digital (https://github.com/drdnar/GortonDigital) seems like a faithful reproduction.

The ANSI Y14.2 committee has a version of the font available for download here, created by Peter Karnold.

https://cstools.asme.org/csconnect/CommitteePages.cfm?Commit...

The article links to an ‘appendix’ of known digital versions, though it's easy to miss: https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/r...

The text is the material. The medium is the message!

So the Gorton font is as American as apple pie?

…i.e. British! :P

(Sorry couldn’t resist)

I think I have this font indelibly burned into my brain from a childhood of using 8-bit computers.

This is a beautiful article. Absolutely fascinating.

Honestly it feels like it ought to be a coffee-table book. I'd buy it.

The author wrote a whole coffee table book called “Shift Happens”. But it was a one and done kickstarter.

The author has a brilliant presentation on pixel fonts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w&list=PLXDU_eVOJT...

Sad, images stopped loading, reloaded the article half way through and site is down :(

It’s so great to read something interesting, well written, well supported and researched, and totally engrossing. This could have been a paid piece in a magazine, but was given to us all for free. Thanks for that!

A related font, Routed Gothic, linked and discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190397

This was a great read and I especially liked the photos and how they were chose and edited so precisely for the content.

On the RTFA theme:

Gorton sold machines that solved problems.

Typography today is a celebration of self.

Nice article though, an interesting anthropological dive and perhaps the starting point for some research.

Don't miss the interactive demo about 7/8 of the way down the page ("TYPE SOMETHING"). Really clever design.

As someone who only recently retired my IBM model F, those are some hot and spicy keyboards. I wish I'd learned about his book sooner.

looking at those "3"s.. reminded me of these old digit-showing tube lamps.. but their font is slightly different, esp. the 6/9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube

I love how image-centric the blog layout is...

Too bad it needlessly hijacks the history.

Wonderful read. I loved this passage:

"Gorton is a decidedly toy-like, amateurish font deployed to for some of the most challenging type jobs: nuclear reactors, power plants, spacecraft. More than most other fonts, Gorton feels it’s been made by machines for machines – but in its use, it’s also the font that allows you to see so many human mistakes and imperfections.

"...Gorton also feels mistake-friendly. The strange limitations of Gorton mean that some of the transgressions of other fonts don’t apply here... Sure, there are really bad renditions that are inexcusable. But most of the time, the imperfections and bad decisions are what makes Gorton come alive. They don’t feel like a profound misunderstandings of typography, typesetting, or Gorton itself. They don’t feel like abuses or aberrations. No, they feel exactly how Gorton was supposed to be used – haphazardly, without much care, to solve a problem and walk away...

"The transgressions are not really transgressions. They all feel honest. The font and its siblings just show up to work without pretense, without ego, without even sporting a nametag. Gorton isn’t meant to be admired, celebrated, treasured. It’s meant to do some hard work and never take credit for it."

Plenty of parallels here to software work and the seasoned advice you hear about our craft. "Worse is better". "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good". It's about loving your trusty tools, imperfect as they may be.

Who else clicked on 'feel' in the last paragraph?

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