Regular
One geometry.
Portsmouth
Five fonts averaged into one, and spaced by a single rule.
The typeface
Portsmouth is an equal-weight midpoint synthesis of five fonts selected for their organic and simple nature: a terminal, teletext, a comic hand and a lettering template contribute to a smooth and generic font that one could find anywhere. A monospaced font gives every letter an equal box; Portsmouth additionally sets every letter the same distance from its neighbors, measured ink to ink, with no kerning table and no optical fitting, and the rhythm comes out even, allowing even non-monospaced fonts a standard cadence. Principled decisions for key letters eliminate confusion; this font is ready for your console.
Try it
Multiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time.
Checking the face…
Spacing
One rule sets the spacing of every letter. The spacing solver centers a letter's ink and gives it an advance equal to its ink width plus 70 units on each side, or 72.5 for a capital, in a 1000-unit em. Two lowercase letters therefore stand 140 units apart, from the last ink of one to the first ink of the next; two capitals stand 145 apart and a mixed pair 142.5. The fonts carry no kern, GPOS or GSUB table, so no pair is ever adjusted after the fact, and a word's rhythm follows from the letters alone.
Portsmouth Rapids keeps the same outlines and removes 68 units from every advance, so its lowercase letters stand 72 units apart under the same rule. Portsmouth Mono keeps a strict 575-unit cell and comes as close to the same gaps as the cell allows: wide letters are compressed by a content-aware horizontal map, and narrow ones widen by at most twelve percent, so that i and l keep their shapes.
PortsmouthMultiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time
Portsmouth RapidsMultiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time
Family
Light
Less radius.
Italic
A 13° wind.
Bold
More radius.
Bold Italic
Both at once.
Mono
for(i=0; i<10; i++)
Construction
The five sources are Annotation Mono, Comic Shanns Mono, Syne Mono, Bedstead and Routed Gothic. Each contributes to the letters it suits: Annotation Mono, Comic Shanns Mono and Routed Gothic to every shared glyph, Syne Mono to capitals only and Bedstead to lowercase only. A cased letter is therefore the average of four sources at one quarter each, and an uncased glyph the average of three at one third.
The sources are first brought to a common em, baseline, x-height, cap height, ascender and descender, keeping each one's horizontal proportions. Every source contour is then traced as 10,240 ordered points, matched to its counterparts by a topology-aware transport, and averaged point by point, so that no source outline serves as the base. Averaging filled distance fields was tried first: it kept the weight right and erased Bedstead's peaked second shoulder on the m, and was dropped. The averaged points are fitted with Makima curves and converted to TrueType outlines.
Light, Regular and Bold are set by eroding or inflating the averaged outline under a topology constraint, so that no counter closes and no stroke breaks. The Italic is a 13-degree nonlinear wind applied to the upright letter, and Mono maps each letter onto its fixed cell with the content-aware compression described above.
Key letters
m
Filled-field averaging made Bedstead's peaked second shoulder disappear into the rounded majority. Ordered contour transport keeps the sequence of shoulders, with every source at equal quarter weight.
a
The sources do not agree on what an a is. Portsmouth's one-storey a is an equal-third fusion of Comic Shanns Mono, Syne Mono and Routed Gothic, and its accented forms are built on that decision.
Q
Transporting the tail and the counter separately cut a notch into the bowl. Portsmouth treats the place where the tail meets the counter as one coupled boundary.
0
Two sources slash their zero and one does not. The three outer rings and the shared counter are fused equally, and the Portsmouth solidus is then shortened to sit inside the ring.
0 1 i I l |
The zero is slashed. The one has a flag and a foot. Capital I has bars at both ends and lowercase l is a plain stem, while the pipe stands taller and runs the full height. Lowercase i keeps its detached dot.
← ↑ → ↓ ↔ ↕ ‹ › ▲ ▶ ▼ ◀ • … −
The arrows take their scale, topology and optical center from the distance fields of the parent letters, and a straight-skeleton construction joins the curved, pixel and stencil sources where they disagree. Icons that belong to a renderer stay out of the font.
“Wait—what?”;
The semicolon's lower mark sits exactly midway between the comma and the colon's lower dot, and the hyphen is raised to the crossbar of the plus. Curly quotes come from the same equal-third fusion as the rest of the punctuation. The em dash, U+2014, is drawn as a small thinking cloud, a break in the thought.
Specimens
Sources
- Annotation Mono, SIL Open Font License 1.1: lowercase and capitals
- Comic Shanns Mono, MIT: lowercase and capitals
- Syne Mono, SIL Open Font License 1.1: capitals
- Bedstead, public domain: lowercase
- Routed Gothic, SIL Open Font License 1.1: lowercase and capitals
Portsmouth is not an original or endorsed version of any of these fonts, and uses none of their reserved names.
Download
Portsmouth is MIT licensed. Each download includes the project record, with the identity of every source and every design decision.
- Portsmouth 1.0: five proportional faces, Mono, a separate Regular built without Makima curves, and a TrueType collection (ZIP)
- Portsmouth Rapids 1.0: the five tighter proportional faces and a TrueType collection (ZIP)
- Portsmouth Mono 1.0: the fixed-cell face on its own (ZIP)
- LICENSE.txt: the MIT license
A later version will fit the lowercase l to the spacing rule as closely as the other letters and add more glyphs.