THE PROBLEM.

Most typewriter fonts out there are hopelessly unrealistic—especially the popular freeware ones, most of them made in the early 2000’s.

What's worse, the typewriter is now so old that many (mostly young) people don't even know that the output is unrealistic!!

The main problem is that an analog typewriter is incapable of producing the same output every time. Even the IBM Selectric, one of the most mechanically sophisticated typewriters ever produced, is incapable of doing this. However, most people are not trying to imitate an IBM Selectric; instead they are trying to imitate much older typewriters such as the Underwood №5.

I had the idea for this font for a while, but bearing in mind how much work it would be to recreate, and how many other projects I had to do, I put it off & put it off. Then, one day in Q4 2019, I saw Joker, a very popular film. At the climax of the film, the eponymous Joker is reading typewritten documents.

The absurd lack of realism displayed here let me know that I could put this project off no longer. In case you don't see anything wrong, let me try to help:

• The letters are of different sizes in the first image. That, quite simply, would never happen. Only at the end of the era did typewriters even have changable type elements (“fonts”), certainly the typewriter clumsily being imitated here wouldn't have had them. Look especially at the word «was», that huge ‹a› is completely unrealistic.
• In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy. It is therefore clearly a digital facsimile and not a real typewritten document.

If you still can't see it, as u/Bureaucrat_Conrad on Reddit wasn't able to, simply compare the images in the movie to an old-school typewriter font, CarbonType, © 2004 Vic Fieger, which has one glyph per character:

It is abundantly clear that this is the font they used, and no typewriter was involved in the production of this scene, even though the documents were the primary object of the scene.

While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don't often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

1. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
2. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

Behold, The Irishman and its ‹W›’s:

In case you still continue to doubt that I am right about how analog typewriter outlook appears, let me display below a sampling of it before I discuss my solution to this vexing issue.

Notice especially the dissimilarity of the «a»’s—

(Image courtesy Texas Christian University—Mary Couts Burnett Library)

Notice especially the dissimilarity of the CAPITAL LETTERS—

(Image courtesy Theodore Munk)

Content © Fredrick R. Brennan, originally released on 1 January 2020