or something close. Bonus points if you know a way I can print off a few words using it.
I don’t believe this is a standardized font, but rather something calligraphed by the carpenter or decorator. The lowercase e’s in the text are not standardized.
Concur it’s probably hand-formed. However, the carver might have been looking at an example. I’d look at italic versions of the classic fonts - Garamond, Caslon, Palatino etc. You might find a close enough match to do whatever it is you wanna do.
The lowercase g, l and s are distinctive enough to use as markers.
I did a font search using the image. To my eye, the closest font in the results is Calligri Extra Condensed Italic.
Hope that helps.
There are a lot of letters in the photo that are not present in your sample; and the lower case “p” is very different.
But I think you’re in the ballpark somewhere.
Roddy
Definitely done by hand. All the strokes seem to have equal thickness, and the degree of slant isn’t even consistent (compare the “k” and the “p”). Nor are the cap height or the x-height (compare the “K” and the “S”, and the “r” and the “q”).
It’s in German so I’d look for a German font.
Also, that’s probably made from some scribing device that used a master set of letters in blocks. It’ll be unlikely that you’ll find an exact match. But, there are a lot of letters so you can make your own font and fill in the blanks with a close German font.
Thank you. I’ll look into all your suggestions.
You might try a site like Identifont:
You might find something close if you scan the Formal script and Casual script font lists over at Fonts.com. It’s worth clicking on anything that seems even remotely similar, because fonts within each “family” can vary considerably (and have considerably different effects depending on how you space the letters).
As for printing off a few words (presumably without having installed the relevant font on your computer), the only thing that occurs to me offhand, would be to type them into something like Font.com’s “Try it” feature, and take a screenshot of it for printing.
There are a gazillion fonts out there, and more being added everyday, which makes matching an obscure font infernally hard, but finding something similar in feel (which can conceivably be tweaked depending on what you’re doing with it) relatively easy.