Does anyone know if any of these Lettres Ornees versions been digitized? It seems they are from wood/metal type-era...
I know version A was digitized by someone but it seems to have been based from a low resolution scanned source as I can see the details are very rough...
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| A.png | 376.26 KB |
| B.png | 321.44 KB |
| C.png | 298.54 KB |
There are a few digitalisation of the genre, mostly “free fonts”, usually not of the best quality, as you already noticed.
http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers/steffmann/samples/l/lettres.htm
http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers/westwind/exotica.htm
(I can’t find an oblique version)
Looking at past threads (http://typophile.com/node/67020 http://typophile.com/node/42149 http://typophile.com/node/73447 http://www.typophile.com/node/106599) it seems that one still can acquire it in metal and there are at least two commercial releases:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/celebrity/parisian-ornamentals/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/wiescherdesign/fleurons-initials/ (this one is a less textured version)
The fact that they’re commercial doesn’t automatically guarantee a better quality.
With the recent popularity of chromatic fonts and the efforts to fill the gaps in the Dan X. Solo’s collections, there could be some new offering somewhere too.
The Westwind Exotica glyphs are pretty good except that they each have over 2500 points - making them tricky for printing. The Stefan ones are OK but not very detailed by comparison.
Too many points is the problem with making any of these elaborate ornamented fonts.
About half a decade ago I took a stab at making a well engineered version of Lettres Ornées with the minimum number of points. I got as far as doing part of the letter _E_
That's interesting. I can see why there hasn't been a better version of these ornate fonts available yet.
I guess these type of fonts would be best to be done as layered typefaces? These would probably split the type into several fonts but the point would probably be a lot lower in this case?
I am not a typeface designer so I am not sure all the technical details but it seems layered fonts are popular nowadays?....
Perhaps a layered version, with few ornaments on each layer would be a good solution in order to have high resolution reproduction and easy printing, but will take even longer to make (and to set).
This is probably another way of doing it:
http://www.linotype.com/5221/madame.html
By splitting the ornaments into different stylistic sets...
This version of Madame is well made but I find it awkward to use.
It seems to have been designed for the era when printers had severe memory limitations.
Out of curiosity I assembled the parts into complete letters about a decade ago and tested them on a basic laser printer. Worked fine.
BTW, Madame has far fewer points than any of the ornamented fonts mentioned in this thread.
Don
BTW for fonts with mega points ttf outlines seem to work better than ps. Can't recall the reason.
Don
Captured from web.archive.org on 13 Apr 2015. view this capture
Seems that you have more for image A than B or C. These Lettres Ornées are in a passable digitization as "Parisian Ornamentals." Were also available as a set of Letraset dry contact letters. Compare to a fairly high quality specimen full alphabet in Lambert's _Letter Forms_[1964] at page 130. Sample:
Don