Explanation November 12, 2003 The Canadian flag font
Background	¶ Since I could not locate it anywhere, I decided to make a small Canadian flag font. The Canadian maple leaf flag was inaugurated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on February 15, 1965. It was designed by George F. G. Stanley and John Matheson. Its measurements have to be deduced from this official drawing. ¶ I do not claim that my font is optimal in any respect even though I tried to adhere to the Canadian Government standard. I doubt that I will get a tax cut because of this. Anyway, I am open to requests for improvements and modifications. I thought long and hard about the name for the font. Trudeau, one of my heroes, came to mind, but his name could upset my friends in Quebec. More than anything, the flag stands for openness and freedom. So, with four gloomy years ahead under the right-wing leadership of Paul Martin, it is more important than ever to tip the balance back to the left and honor a Montrealer whose ideology I respect, and who will stand up for everyone's freedoms and rights, the ex-President of the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and my colleague, Julius Grey. By the way, the initial request for the font came from someone involved in the lack-of-basic-rights story of Steven Truscott, who was falsely accused of murder over 40 years ago and nearly hanged.
The JuliusGrey font	¶ So, here are the files. The flag is obtained by typing "1". Positions "2" through "4" show the flag with increasingly thick borders, designed so that they can be colored separately from the flag itself. Position "5" is just the maple leaf by itself. By the way, the flag's red is officially bright red, "#ff0000" for the html-generation. What puzzles me is that the red in the official flag shown above, taken from the government site, is slightly pink: "#ff0033". Other flags I found on the web were even more pinkish: "#e0004a". Since the government uses it, we should perhaps stick to "#ff0033". PFA file PFB file (binary type 1 file) AFM file PFM file TFM file TTF file (PC) TTF file (Mac dfont) TTF file (Mac binary) ZIP file
Samples	¶ Sample GIF files made using my font.
Other sources	¶ Wikimedia has this SVG code for the official flag. Also check the Oh Cannabis flag sold by a Taiwanese company in 2005 for 15.95 CAD. Wikipedia. Site with many images of Canadian flags.
	Copyright © 2003 Luc Devroye School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 luc@cs.mcgill.ca http://jeff.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/index.html