Enclosed Alphanumerics (aka Subway Bullets)
Ever noticed that the enclosed alphanumerics range of Unicode (U+2060 through U+24FF) sucks? Wanted something that looked more professional (for instance, for effects similar to the New York City Subway map)?
Robert Marrero has created PostScript Type 1 and True Type fonts with highly legible sans-serif (similar to Akzidenz Grotesk or Neue Haas Grotesk) letters A through Z (including such NY-unfriendly letters, such as I, O, P, and X) and figures 0 through 16 in a variety of shapes (solid and hollow circles and diamonds, plus solid squares and diamonds-on-squares). His website is currently down, but he has kindly let me mirror his fonts here:
- SLRM.tar.gz (Type 1, 121 KiB, © Robert Marrero)
- SLRM.zip (TTF, 41 KiB, © Robert Marrero)
These fonts also include a selection of useful double letters and other goodies at ASCII +0130 through +0156.
If you need circles containing numbers 17 and over, there are a couple of free fonts available. Firstly, Sean Cavanaugh's CombiNumerals 4.0 provides solid (bold) and hollow (roman) circles (formed from semi-circles, lower case left, upper case right), allowing sans-serif figures 00 through 99 and 0 through 9. Secondly, those favoring serif titling figures can have 0 through 80 on solid circles with Ray Larabie's Number Pile.
If anyone knows of a font that includes other double letters (or better still combinable semi-circles), or combinable half-squares, half-diamonds, etc, or novelty shapes (e.g. pentagons, hexagons, triscaedecagons), then drop me an e-mail (watch the obvious Pythonesque spiced-ham-traps) and I'll include a link.
Other Stuff
Ban Comic Sans MS. Ban Verdana. Ban Courier New. Ban Times New Roman. Ban Arial. These fonts have all had their day. Actually, that's not true: Verdana never had a day at all; its sole function is to trap people into designing websites with broken layouts. It doesn't even have the redeeming virtue of tragicomedy...
Please note that I am anti-crap typography, not anti-Microsoft. I like their new fonts. Well, 8 out of 10, at least. Here are instructions on how to obtain them legally without buying their latest dog of an OS.