Typophile

ID this 1970s typewriter font (followup)

ivandurakov

Sorry, the existing topic wouldn't let me attach an additional file, so I had to start a new one.

The Selectric Composer explanation is plausible, since it explains both the proportional spacing AND the general typewriter-sloppiness of the document. See the extracted pdf page, attached, for a better example of the latter. The nature of the document was such that it probably didn't rate professional typesetting but still something probably a bit better than a typewriter, though I can't say they did a very good job with it. The type-twice method sounds painful....

Thanks, I learned something new today.

PDF icon IBM.pdf
Alex Nelson

I'm not saying it is, but it looks strikingly similar to Excelsior.

ivandurakov

I stumbled across this:

http://www.selectric.org/selectric/fonts/bookface72.gif

Looks like it....

Mark Simonson

...except that it's monospaced, whereas your mystery typewriter face is proportionally spaced. There were high-end typewriters back then that could do proportional spacing. The IBM Executive comes to mind. It's probably one of those. I don't think many of those faces have been digitized, if any. I've never seen one.

ivandurakov

I would speculate, without having researched it further, that IBM could use the same fonts on both their mono-space and proportional-space machines. I.e. maybe the same typeball with differing, machine-specific spacing mechanisms.

ivandurakov

Digging further into the Selectric.org site reveals a proportional font, Boldface, that is somewhat similar to the monospaced Bookface mentioned above:

Bookface, for comparison:

And a selection from the original NASA sample:

Looking at the K and M in Boldface cause me to reverse myself and declare "no match" however...

Mark Simonson

Probably not. Part of the point of being able to do proportional spacing on a typewriter is not having to compromise the proportions of the letters by making them all the same width. The monospaced font you found shows such compromises (unnaturally wide i and l, unnaturally narrow M and W, for example) while the sample in your first post does not.

ivandurakov

Thanks Mark. I guess that is one of many good reasons that nobody routinely uses typewriters anymore. :-)

The two samples were taken directly from the GP Technologies Typing Element Handbook, a fascinating blast from the past, here:

http://www.selectric.org/selectric/GPfonts/index.html

Mark Simonson

Very interesting! And bizarre: "Olde English" and "Oriental" monospaced fonts. Egad!

ivandurakov

Today, in my office at least, use of "Oriental" monospaced would earn one a trip to the PC re-education camp.

Lee Murphy

Hello all!

I understand that I am replying to an incredibly old post, however I had been search for a similar typeface for over two years and only discover what it was a couple of days ago. While doing so I found character sets that identified the typeface ivandurakov posted as IBM Bold Face No.2 which was available on some models of IBM electric typewriter. The following is a sample of the typeface:
http://munk.org/typecast/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IBM-1960-Catalog-22.jpg

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