Typophile

Freiburger

Jared Benson

At the risk of offending type historians everywhere, I thought I'd take a stab at recreating an old type specimen in bitmap form. It's Sunday, I'm home sick, so why not?

The following specimen is scanned from D.B.Updike's Printing Types, Vol 1, pg. 87. This was the type used for the first Bible printed in France: Freiburger, Gering and Kranz, Paris 1476

frei specimen

And then here's a couple of hours' work in Bitfonter:

freiburger

So before you slam the R and the V, let me know if the bitmap feels true to the original forms, and where improvements might be made.

Thanks //jb

John Hudson

This sure brings back memories. A few years ago I knocked together a set of heavy titling caps inspired by the FGK uppercase. I only used them once, and never extended the character set beyond the basic alphabet.
Bible Black
Obviously I rationalised a few things more than Jared has done in his bitmap font.

John Hudson

Oops, I forgot the wide-boy Bible Black Z

Hrant H Papazian

That's pretty nice.
I just think the "Q" needs a perpendicular shear in there.
The "S" rules.

hhp

Jared Benson

John, gorgeous work! Methinks I should quit wasting my time on bitmaps ... :-)

Joe Pemberton

Jared, you've gone mad! But I do like the color this creates.

Miguel may be right about the size, but then I think, much
larger and a bitmap is pretty useless anyway. Then again,
are you thinking about utility with this exercise anyway?

Miguel Hernandez

>At the risk of offending type historians everywhere...

>I'm home sick, so why not?

Well, if you try to keep the spirit of the original forms in that small size, you

Captured from web.archive.org on 14 Apr 2015. view this capture