TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Jan 27 14:40:09 EST 2025

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Raph Levien

Type and technology expert and computer scientist presently working for Google in Mountrain View, CA. His blog was totally dedicated to free and open software. Raph Levien is a software engineer and tech lead of Android Text on the Android UI Toolkit team at Google. A well-known software guru, he was a lead developer for Gfonted and Spiro (a font editor), and helped out with Gimp, among many other things. Raph's previous work includes Google Fonts and the open source Ghostscript PostScript/PDF engine. The topic for his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is on better techniques for interactively designing curves, and he also used these tools to design Inconsolata, one of the fonts available on the font API (see CTAN).

Inconsolata (2005) became an instant hit as a monospaced programming font. It was modified by Raph Levien and Kyrill Tkachev as late as 2011. Further modifications were done by Michael Sharpe. CTAN link. See also Open Font Library for this relative of Franklin Gothic.

Raph is working on a revival of ATF Century Catalogue, and proposes it as a replacement for the skinny Computer Modern fonts used in TeX. Other fonts in the pipeline include Century Catalogue, Bruce Rogers' Centaur types, Museum Caps, LeBe Titling, LeBe Book, ATF Bodoni and ATF Franklin Gothic.

Raph's type page, where one can download his didone fonts ghr10 and ghmi10 (2009) and look at Soncino Italic (2009), a lively informal text font.

In 2007, he finally published the Museum Fonts package (see also Open Font Library) based on historical metal Centaur fonts, all free. He writes:

• Museum Sixty is based on 60 point metal Monotype Centaur. The source for A-Z& is the specimen page opening American Proprietary Typefaces, ed. David Pankow. The primary source for the lowercase is the original Centaur specimen booklet by Lanston Monotype, London, 1929.
• Museum Fourteen is based on 14 point metal Monotype Centaur. The primary source is the text of Americal Proprietary Typefaces.
• Museum Bible is based on 18 point metal Bible Centaur. The source is the booklet, "An Account of the Making of the Oxford Lectern Bible", Lanston Monotype, Philadelphia, 1936.
• Museum Foundry is based on the 14 point original foundry version of Centaur, as cut by Robert Wiebking of Chicago. The source is "Amycus et Célestin", printed at the Museum Press in New York, 1916.

Speaker at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik and at ATypI 2015 in Sao Paulo. Klingspor link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Raph Levien
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type blogs ⦿ Font software ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Fonts with TEX ⦿ Bezier curves ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Type scene in California ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Fonts for programming ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Venetian or antiqua typefaces ⦿