Silentype Font v2.0 Released!

I have great pleasure in announcing that v2.0 of my Silentype font is now officially released as a New Year gift to the Apple ][ community. I originally made this font so I could recreate my Year 10 Technology magnus opus.

I’ve generated versions for pretty well all major modern operating systems – and a few not so modern ones (Mac OS 9 [and prior], I’m looking at you!).

I’m releasing it under the SIL Open Font Licence (OFL), which I recommend you check out if, like me, you’re a not-for-profit font designer who would still like guidelines placed on how your creations are used. The OFL’s aim is:

…to enable a true open typographic community to spring up and grow. The OFL provides a legal framework and infrastructure for worldwide development, sharing and improvement of fonts and related software in a collaborative manner. It enables font authors to release their work under a common license that allows bundling, modification and redistribution. It encourages shared value, is not limited to any specific computing platform or environment, and can be used by other organisations or individuals.

It seemed a good fit for what I was hoping to achieve with my Silentype font. Oh, and if you’re wondering, “Silentype” is officially a “dead” trademark, so I didn’t have any qualms about using it as the actual name of my font.

The letterforms were all independently created by me in 2003 and 2004, with recent modifications to accommodate later OS X versions’ predilection to fill in the counters on the letters “o”and “O”, the number “8” and the ampersand (“&”). I recognise what it is about those characters’ counters that is common to them and not with other characters with counters, but I don’t know why that particular attribute caused the counters to fill in current versions of OS X when in 2003 and 2004 OS X as it was then was quite happy to display the characters correctly.

Oh, and I’ve added a (very) low-res Apple logo to the font at the appropriate location. I may extend the character set further during January, but don’t have any firm plans on that front at the moment.

I used Fontographer v5.2.1 for this version, as I’d used v3.5 to create the original font and I wanted as smooth a path from the original .fog file (rather than being recreated from the generated font files). The .fog file is available upon application.

The font is released as a free resource for the Apple ][ and Apple /// communities. I would appreciate a heads-up if it’s bundled with any applications.

Please also let me know in the comments if you use the font, or even just if you had a Silentype “back in the day”.

4 thoughts on “Silentype Font v2.0 Released!”

Comments are closed.