My husband (who is crawling around in the attic this morning) has tasked me with finding a certain font for him, today.
It is used on a 1940s engineering graph from RCA. It is definitely drawn by a vector plotter. With a little research I found the Hershey fonts, of which Simplex Roman/HersheySans looks most similar. The RCA plot letters are wider and rounder than Hershey, though. They have a nice fat comfortable look to them. Because they were drawn with a single pass of a plotter pen, they have rounded rather than squared ends to the lines.
Can anyone (a) give me more leads on vintage vector plotter fonts, or (b) just send me to a font website that has managed to create a category where they’re easy to find?
I have the following vector fonts:
Eng_EuroExtLine.otf
Eng_FuturaLine.otf
Eng_HelveticaFil2.otf
Eng_HelvFill.otf
Eng_HelvLine.otf
Eng_LubalinLine.otf
Eng_ParkAveLine.otf
Eng_RomanFil2.otf
Eng_RomanFill.otf
Eng_SquireLine.otf
Eng_UniversLine.otf
Eng_VandLine.otf
I don’t have any simple way of showing you what they look like, but search on the web, and maybe one will be close to what you want.
Hmmmmmm. Like I said in my OP, it isn’t any of the Hershey fonts I’ve seen, unless it’s one of them that has been stretched wider than normal.
Sorry for offending everyone with the “40s” thing. My husband hadn’t thought about the way the graph was generated and made a wild guess of “40s” which I repeated here.
Update–my husband just showed me the book that the graph comes from. It was published in 1942. I guess the pictures weren’t drawn with a vector plotter, so my next question is, what WERE they drawn with?
But the link to the book (page 9 and, even better, page 6), is that what you’re looking for? I found the book during a search that lead to a similar question posted in 2009 (not on SDMB).
If that’s what you’re seeking, I haven’t found anything real close. There’s a rounded DIN face that was thematically similar (old mechanical drafting font with rounded ends), but had different letter forms.
Many programs (page layout, word processing, Photoshop, etc.) can apply a “faux bold” effect to a font, and many programs can stretch the horizontal width of a font. Both effects have drawbacks, but can be safely used with restraint. When you expand a typeface’s width, the vertical strokes get fatter than the horizontal strokes, but making a face 20% wider or so usually doesn’t hurt. When you use “faux bold” it can fill in fine details, but the old-time plotter fonts were kind of crude looking, so it probably wouldn’t hurt them much.
Here’s the search results for "drafting"fonts on www.myfonts.com . Since I don’t know exactly what the OP is looking for, I can only guess which ones might be close. My guess is that Bryant and DIN 17 have the right feel (crudely mechanical with rounded ends on the strokes) but not the exact letter forms… rounded tops on the numeral 3, rather than angular, that sort of thing.
Engineering drawings of that time would have been lettered using a “Leroy” guide. Oddly, there don’t seem to be a lot of good digital fonts that mimic that look. I think Simpliciter Sans looks the closest.
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