# Routed Gothic Font

A clean implementation of a common lettering style found on technical drawings, engraved office signs, computer and typewriter keyboards, and some comic books and avionics from the mid-20th century.

It’s ugly, and therein lies its beauty.

I created this font by purchasing a Leroy Lettering set, using Inkscape to trace the scanned letterforms of one of its templates, and some FontForge Python scripting.

Other keywords I want people to use to find this font include: Wrico.

Early 1970s avionics diagram, based on an image stolen from this StackOverflow question, an answer to which mentions this font!

## Notes

The “italic” fonts of this typeface are literally slanted 22.5°, as a drafter would do.

The “half italic” fonts of this typeface are slanted 11.25°, as seen in a small number of vintage drawings.

There are no hints, as I originally created this font for a project intended to be printed at a sufficiently high resolution to obviate them. I might make hints later though.

## License

Routed Gothic is now distributed under the terms of the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

## Coverage

Every ASCII character, ISO Latin 1, much of Unicode’s General Punctuation block for common typographic symbols, and then some.

## Other Implementations of This Font

- National Park — Based on engraved National Park signage.
- Planscribe NF — A similarly clean font with tighter kerning.
- Sublime — A slightly distressed font, to recall comic book lettering.
- Gorton — There’s an actual italic!
- Gorton Digital — drdnar’s implementation. Free for non-commercial use. Based on Gorton engraving machine templates, providing some differences from the Leroy templates.

## Other Fonts in a Similar Vein

- Simpliciter Sans
- Bryant
- Gotham Rounded — One of the samples shows a schematic blueprint looking drawing that sells it very well.
- Proxima Soft — A rounded version of Proxima Nova, a Gotham lookalike.
- DIN 17 SB — A rounded DIN font.
- DIN 17 / TGL 0-17 and DIN 16 / TGL 0-16 — Italic and upright versions of the medium ISO 3098/1 (DIN 6776) font.
- osifont
- Engineering Plot
- Engineer

## Other Aircraft Instrumentation Fonts

- United States Military Standard 33558, Numerals and Letters, Aircraft Instrument Dial, Standard Form of — It’s the font you’ve seen on old aircraft instruments. Implementation by Derek Higgs archived here.
- Futura, ATF Spartan, etc.

## My Other Font(s)

- DSE Typewriter, an old-timey typewriter font you can use for coding. Can you not yet tell that I love old-timey fonts?
- DSE Typewriter Bitmap, an X Window System bitmap font I made decades ago. It's similar to DSE Typewriter, but not exactly the same.