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Chris' British Road Directory [Nathaniel Porter]

Chris Marshall's web site on British roads and traffic signs. He has a subpage on fonts used on British highways. Based on these specifications, Nathaniel Porter and John Prentice (who added Greek characters, based on Greek road signs) made a set of free fonts that follow the British highway system. These include Transport Medium, Medium Greek and Heavy (the main British highway font), Motorway Permanent (for numbers on signs), Motorway Temporary (for use on temporary signs), Pavement (for painted lettering on the road surface), and VMS (an octagonal font for use in light-up panels). Erik Spiekermann blasts his implementation of Transport: A gentleman called Nathaniel Porter has digitized Transport Heavy, and it is being used by various agencies. The data is even worse than the Swedish Tratex font which must have been done by an amateur on on Ikarus system without corrections. This one here is just a raw scan. Amazingly, it works as a font. Too heavy for signs, but just shows how good font software has become if it can actually make a working font from a scan that looks like a piece of German rye bread. I suspect that this version of Transport Heavy is being used in Italy and Spain. And in Greece as well. They also made Old Road Sign Font after the road sign lettering in the UK in use before 1964. Its origins go back to 1944.

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Chris' British Road Directory
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Map/Travel dingbats ⦿ Octagonal typefaces ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿