Typophile

(x) Fonts from an '80s computer book - ITC Avant Garde Gothic, Antique Olive, Palatino, Courier {Max P, Greg Shutters}

dddaaannn

I'm trying to identify or find close substitutes for three fonts from a series of computer books from my childhood. Specifically, I'm interested in the title/heading font, the body text font, and the code font from Compute!'s First Book of Commodore 64. Pictures follow.

The heading font, from the cover, chapter heading, and section heading:

The text font, with examples of quotes, numbers and boldface:

The code font, with examples of numbers (note the 0 with the line through it), uppercase and lowercase letters (lowercase code is very rare in this book, and may not even be the same typeface):

I'm particularly interested in the code font, since it's the one that gives me the warmest fuzzies, and also seems to be the hardest to find a substitute for. Compute! always used a Selectric-like typewriter font for Commodore 64 program listings, and for some reason used uglier dot-matrix-style text for listings for other computers. I don't know how these books were typeset, but I wouldn't be surprised if the code sections were imaged from the output of the actual machines connected to certain printers (but I could be totally wrong about that).

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

-- Dan

maxgraphic

Looks like Avant Garde, Antique Olive, Palatino, and I'm not sure about the code font, sorry.

Greg Shutters

The font on the cover is "ITC Avant Garde". The chapter headings are in "Antique Olive". I'm not positive on the text but it appears to be "Palatino" (judging from the "P"). The code font seems to be your standard "Courier", though it looks like they might be using a slashed "O" instead of the zero (I think in the version of Courier I have the alternate zero has a dot inside of it, not the slash).

Hope this helps!

EDIT: Whoops! Looks like maxgraphic beat me to it.

Ray Larabie

The code was probably printed on a daisy wheel printer. Magazines back then usually used a standard daisy wheel for their code. A few even used ribbon print for code samples. A had an Epson with that very same font and I remember doing a copy replace to add a backspace and slash to all the zeros for some reason. I don't know if print wheels had a slash on the zero.

dddaaannn

Thanks everyone!

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