17C Print : Fonts : CDD

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Single Typeface Packs

Available packs:

17C Print OT Pack
Rustic Capitals OT Pack
Written Square Capitals OT Pack
Uncial OT Pack

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17th Century Print OT Pack

This Single Typeface Pack contains a family of two fonts: 17C Print OT and 17C Italic OT.

Important Note: To access historical characters and the special OpenType features in this font, you will need to use an OpenType enabled application. Office for Windows provides this as standard; Mac users will need to be using Apple TextEdit, Pages, Microsoft Office 2004+, the Adobe CS range or Quark XPress 7. See opentype for full details.

Typeface display:

Some of the extra historical characters provided:

OpenType Features:

Text (Caxton-style) glyph set
Footnotes glyph set
Drop capitals glyph set

[OpenType Feature Key | OpenType Information]

Historical note:

The advent of the printing press saw the early type designers, typified by Guttenberg and Caxton, striving to reproduce the contemporaneous written styles, which, in the early fifteenth century were based on various forms of text hand. The Humanists of the Italian Renaissance wanted a ‘new’ writing style and they found inspiration in the the old tenth century Carolingian hand, through its clean and elegant form. In deference to its roots it was known as Littera Antiqua, and, coupled both with a cursive, forward slanted variant known as Italic, and Roman square capitals, it became the de facto style across Europe, by the beginning of the sixteenth century (although notably not in the Germanic countries where text hand remained the standard). Inevitably, the printers embraced this new writing style as the standard and most legible typeface. Such was its success, that there really is very little difference between this and the ‘roman’ typestyles of today

The 17C Print OT fonts were taken from a book published in 1686; they were designed to incorporate not only the imperfections but also the art of seventeenth century printing, including many glyph variants based on optical size, ligature, alphabet and typestyle.