PR Uncial Is a History Lesson in Digital Font-Making

Canadian font designer St. Peter Rempel brings his love of handwritten letterforms to the screen with a free download of Atomic number 59 Uncial, a playful introduction to the artistry of handwriting forms.

PR Uncial font screenshot — Atomic number 59 Uncial brings gothic style to the screen with bold, round strokes.

Clip was when letterforms came about from hand and nib not pawl and pixel. Beginning roughly 200 AD, a particular style titled Uncial was the go-to choice of scribes writing out Latin and Greek texts. Uncial relies on simple, ringed strokes from a penitentiary held in one position.

Hardworking copyists unbroken this simple flair fashionable for centuries. In fact, as Rempel shows in this font intent, Script never exhausted verboten of fashion. An early start draftsmanship Uncial letterforms has glorious many of the designer's works, including PR Viking, some other PCWorld favorite.

PR Uncial is a history lesson in electronic typeforms. The base inspiration came from the cover of the 1978 Magnum edition of The Lord of the Rings. The designer's first samples were made with an bordered pen and chisel point marker on paper, then rebuilt connected a Mac Classic using Mac Draw and inspiration from the Speedball Textbook for the straight strokes, curves and serifs. (Geek note: The Speedball textbook is very much in circulation today, available new and used for less than a ground beef in my metropolis's gourmet ghetto and worth every penny if you want to bring authenticity to your own font experiments.)

In 1996 Rempel noninheritable a Windows PC with font editing software. Glitch-free register transfer between MAC and Microcomputer was a ways off, so the designer had a Quaker glance over a print come out of the closet, then redrew the forms in vector arrange, cleaned up the curves in CorelDraw 4 and finally brought the file away into Fontographer 4 for grave redaction.

Personal preferences burst in PR Uncial. Rempel based his forms along a rounded "O", rather than the more angular dictated of strokes that the early Uncials are known for. The designer used a international redaction function to reaching the letters unity and a half times their original width, further emphasizing that roundness. Spheric stretching of a baptismal font behind create problems. Case in show: PR Script's D, with a posture that too tight resembles an O and would have been bettor served with an triangular stroke and a narrower stance.

Same Uncials of old, PR Uncial has no lowercase. Or else, it presents a duplicate set of scaled-down capitals. The petit mal epilepsy of a lowercase, the addition of pen ornamentation in the centre of letters corresponding O, Q and D, and the horizontal adulterate in the overall forms guarantees a andante read if the font is used for text edition font even though a range of punctuation, monetary and other useful symbols are included. Still, points to Rempel for big us an old-style ampersand viewing the original binder of the letters E and T ("et" is Latin for "and") , likewise Eastern Samoa a cat-tailed @ communicatory.

PR Uncial is best used in exhibit work, at sizes 24 points and in a higher place. Pay attention to spot kerning the letter pairs, deflect any confusedness the D might give rise and you'll be rewarded with a meet of medieval expressive style that all the same shines. PR Script is no slump when putt short titles such as Billy Goats Gruff and The Sword in the Stone through their paces. Sadly, that D problem makes it a poor choice for A Saltation With Dragons.

This download is free for non-commercial use. Rempel is currently working on an updated, commercial version that will include a true lowercase based on fractional-uncial forms with full endorse for Westbound European languages, as well as a ligature set and cyclic characters. Atomic number 2 has a fine start in PR Script, where practice with pen nib and paper do a much than passable job of bringing a centuries-old style to today's glowing screens.