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It started with Gutenberg

BBC Renaissance Secrets 
A discussion of whether Gutenberg really invented the movable type process for printing. 

America Writes Home 
Study of oldstyle handwriting and printers’ ligatures.

AncientScripts 
An introduction to writing systems, phonetics, and historical linguistics plus an extensive list of links.

Fonts on the WWW

Dr. Berlin’s Foreign Font Archive 
Although it’s a little hard to find what you need, persistence will reward you with over 449 free font files for more than 85 languages that require special characters and non-Roman alphabets.

Cyrillic Fonts and Project Vedi
Two Russian sites offering free downloadable Cyrillic fonts.

Harold's FontsHarold's Fonts
Harold Lohner offers his excellent original freeware, shareware, and for-purchase fonts in a broad variety of styles on a website that also displays a number of other inspiring design projects.

Nick's FontsNick’s Fonts 
Inspired by illustration and advertising art from the 1920s through the 1950s, Nick Curtis gives away his extremely well-crafted fonts and artwork, presented with an Art Deco flair and a subtle sense of humor. 

Scriptorium Fonts & ArtScriptorium Fonts and Graphic Arts
David Nalle’s extensive, visually rich site offers free trial versions of original calligraphic and other fonts plus dozens of low-cost, high-quality fonts and period art from a variety of historical sources. One notable package includes antique maps and map-making tools. 

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Font Utilities

Printer’s Apprentice 
This award-winning font manager displays a list of your fonts, one character of a highlighted font, the entire character set, a line or paragraph of boilerplate, or the keyboard. Print specimen sheets, invoke Adobe Type Manager, go to the Windows Control Panel, or pop up a window to copy characters to the clipboard. Install or uninstall fonts singly or in groups you've defined for special purposes. Shareware: $25 registration.

The Font ThingThe Font Thing
 Only slightly less powerful than Printer’s Apprentice, Sue Fisher’s intelligently designed font management utility is free for the downloading. If you have a lot of fonts on your system it may take a long time to load, but that's a good reason to archive some of those rarely used fonts.

Symbol Selector 
Pop up a window that displays your symbol and dingbat fonts. Select the font on a pull-down menu and you see all the characters in that font. Click on one character to see it enlarged, in color, bold, and/or italics. Then save the selected symbol as a .bmp or .wmf graphic or copy the character to the Windows clipboard. Shareware: $20 registration.

Fingertip Software
A commercial site offering “fonts, software, and keyboards for multilingual computing” includes inexpensive Cyrillic fonts and software for cyrillicizing your computer.

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Typography resources

A Disagreeably Facetious Type Glossary for the Amusement & Edification of People Beginning a Love Affair with Fonts
Ever hear of a minikin or a brevier? If you heard the word bourgeois pronounced "ber-joyce," would you know what it means? This more-than-a glossary, provided by Microsoft, will answer these and other questions you didn't even know enough to ask.

Counterspace
Attractive, informative site on typography with a timeline depicting milestones in the history of mark making.

International Typeface Corporation
This site is distinguished by its informative and entertaining periodical U&lc. For type terms check out Anatomy of a Character and Type by Definition).

Glossary of Typography
Type terminology from Adobe.

Recommended reading

Bringhurst: Elements of Typographic StyleElements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is considered the Bible of typography. Easy to read, beautifully produced and illustrated, and highly informative, it is a must for the reference shelf of anyone interested in the history, art, and proper use of type.

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