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Heritage Type Co. of Berlin, Germany, http://www.heritagetype.com, recently released a bundle of digital vintage-appearing type fonts that have many possibilities for use in creating scale structure signs, station signs, advertisements and more, appropriate for many past eras. Their Vintage Font Bundle is priced at $49 and available for download at their website. Fonts come in OpenType and TrueType formats and are compatible with Windows-based and Mac computers running Microsoft Word, PowerPoint Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and other software. I used a Dell laptop running Windows 7 and Microsoft Office. The purchase, download and installation procedure was quick and easy. I selected the font package at the website, paid via PayPal using a standard dialog, and received a confirmation with an active download link about 1 minute later. The fonts came in a 350 Mb ZIP file. I unpacked the file using a standard ZIP reader, navigated the folder tree to a particular font, and double-clicked on an OTF (OpenType Format) file, which caused the instant installation of that font into Windows and Word.

Fonts in the bundle are titled Royal Signage, Blackriver, Brilon, OldErika and OldAlfie.

In a few seconds, I had mocked up the signs shown here using PowerPoint, for later printing on a color laser printer.

While these fonts are 21st-century creations, they appear era-appropriate for 1880 to 1950. For less than the cost of many craftsman kits, this package offers beautiful fonts that are easy to use and will enhance many structures and signs.

Thank you

Thank you for this great link; I just ordered two fonts and like you a few minutes later they were usable on my computer with windows 10.

The fonts work on my Open Office apache word system.

FONT'S FREE

This is a good site with hundreds of free font's. 

https://www.dafont.com/

Have fun.

Mark

Typefaces

The word "Font" drives me nuts. In the era of computers, people use the word all the time to describe stuff that isn't right. I hear people call something "10 font type" which is wrong wrong wrong. They're typefaces, which is the term actually used to give a name to one over the other. It'd be "10 point type," to describe its size. Points represent 1/72 of an inch. Picas were also used but points were by far the most common way to measure the height of the type itself.

I spent almost 2 years in commercial art school in the late 80s and we spent a lot of time studying this. We hand-lettered everything at that time as the mac computers had just come out and they had very limited amounts of typefaces back then (we would sometimes spit out lettering on take shortcuts on the type spacing, which is called something else but I won't go into that here)...

Anyway, these digital typefaces are in many cases throwback looks that were created in recent years. A lot of typefaces that are supposed to be from a certain era are, often, created to give the look of a typeface used in that era, but not what they actually used back then. I have typeface books from the 30s and 40s and it's really clear when you see these modern versions v/s what they used back then (also, keep in mind that they were all hand-rendered back then, except by linotype machines for newspapers and printers for small versions).

If you're going to go with it anyway, yeah, there are lots of websites where you can get free downloads of typefaces of all different types (pun intended). I didn't see anything on this website that seemed to merit the purchase price.

I really wish someone could digitize the actual typefaces from the 20s to the 50s, but it's only happened in a very few examples...

But no matter what, anything's gotta be better than what so many people use on their layouts, the majority of layout signs I've seen over the years are Helvetica (a typeface that didn't exist until the late 50s if memory serves), a san-serif typeface, on a very open background of white or a solid color, so large an elderly person could can read them from across the room without glasses. You would almost never see that in real life as a painted sign anywhere, yet so many layouts have them that way anyhow...

Typeface vs font

You realize you're dealing with an editor/publisher when you bring this topic up! (wink and grin)

From a web article on this topic ...

In other words ...

song + song + ... = album

font + font + ... = typeface

But in common language usage, font and typeface are becoming interchangeable terms.

P.S. It's the age old debate -- is the language what the academics say it is, or is the language what the people actually speak? Like or not, word meanings do evolve over time and no academic in the world can prevent that from happening.

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"Font" correctly names a set of glyphs of a typeface having a given style and weight. Helvetica is a typeface; Helvetica Bold Italic is a font.  The English derivation is from "type foundry," institutions mostly first established in London to make sets of metal type on a volume, commercial basis. A set of type then was said to come from a particular foundry or "fount," and finally "font" became associated with the product. Cf. S. Loxley, "Type is Beautiful: The Story of Fifty Remarkable Fonts" (2016: Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK).

Fonts and Typefaces

It's always difficult to talk about "correct terminology" in English because it's a very fluid  dialectic language defined by accepted usage not higher authority and that changes over time. 

in the traditional terminology of movable type printing you're quite right of course but the way computers handle text has muddied the waters considerably. A typeface was the fundamental design from which fonts of different sizes could be created. However, that underlying design would be adjusted to suit the font size, often changing the relative weights of different elements. Now though we have "scalable fonts" so the same font is simply enlarged or reduced to whatever size is required, but nothing else changes. 

I currently edit a journal for which I lay out most of the text in 12 point Times New Roman on A4 sized pages but what gets printed are the same pages reduced to A5 so the text is no longer 12 point. For headings and sub headings I use a different typeface because Times New Roman simply doesn't look right to me when enlarged. I suspect that were I doing this in hot metal the headline font would look fine because it would have been optimised for the larger point size. 

This is relevant to using typefaces in railroad modelling because the font used for say a timetable might be rather different than that used for a poster or on the side of a freight car. I discovered this when using a typeface called "Police SNCF" (In this context "police" means "police de caractères" or typeface) developed, not surprisingly, for French railways which I model. It is a fairly geometrical "drawing office" typeface, but the version available as a truetype font is actually the version used for printed material such as timetables. Things like station nameboards and lineside signs for train crews, which were what I needed, were in the same typeface but, for these larger sizes, the fonts were different as were a few of the letter forms. It's not a big difference but it is noticeable. The other thing that varies with size is the "kerning". This is the separation between letters but most word processing software doesn't handle it. To get the letter spacing right, I've found it desirable to lay out the sign or whatever at a large font size in a graphics package (I use Paint Shop Pro but Photoshop and freeware packages would do the same) and then shift indidual letters till it looks right (or matches a photograph of the real thing)

I could just kick myself ...

... for not having preserved a copy of the Typeface handbook published by my maternal grandfather's typesetting service. The company no longer exists, but I learned much from being exposed to the shop where both Linotype (capitalized 'cuz it was a company name), Intertype (a major competitor to Linotype) and hand set type were used along with "cuts" (photo-etched metal plates) and border strips were used in layout of the printed page.

Commercially set type in those days soon morphed into molten pools of type metal to be recycled into the next publications.

I did have a laser printer with a large library of typefaces and software (Lasermaster product) that provided the capability of slanting, curving, and other shaping of the typeface. All of that done with an 80286 intel (one of the company names never capitalized) processor and MS DOS V3.1. (The software was partially in microcode contained on the printer controller printed circuit adapter),

Much of the typefaces that were printed on logos, etc., were hand engraved custom creations - not pulled out from a letter case or from typesetting machines.

Sorry, just had to add my 2 cents here

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Typeface specimen books, which all the major foundries published, are an interesting collecting specialty. They appear regularly in fine book auctions and those from before 1940, in excellent condition, can command very high prices. The period 1895 to 1939 was a golden era in the field, with 1919-1939 seeing an explosion in new faces. Specimen books from that period are really interesting.

The change in time

Whats is amazing with typeface or fonts, is they change in time, new fonts appears which are somewhere connected with the way of life of their time.

Old fonts are easily recognizable just because of their period, each period has his kind of fonts, they seems to be intimately connected with history and evolution of the society.

A very interesting aspect which could be studied, beside  our look and search of specific fonts four the time we model.