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93-456: The FE-Schrift or Fälschungserschwerende Schrift ('forgery-impeding typeface') is a sans serif typeface introduced for use on licence plates . Its monospaced letters and numbers are slightly disproportionate to prevent easy modification and to improve machine readability. The typeface was developed in Germany, where it has been mandatory since November 2000. The abbreviation "FE"

186-430: A monospaced ( non-proportional or fixed-width ) typeface uses a single standard width for all glyphs in the font. Duospaced fonts are similar to monospaced fonts, but characters can also be two character widths instead of a single character width. Many people generally find proportional typefaces nicer-looking and easier to read, and thus they appear more commonly in professionally published printed material. For

279-403: A vector font . Bitmap fonts were more commonly used in the earlier stages of digital type, and are rarely used today. These bitmapped typefaces were first produced by Casady & Greene, Inc. and were also known as Fluent Fonts. Fluent Fonts became mostly obsolete with the creation of downloadable PostScript fonts, and these new fonts are called Fluent Laser Fonts (FLF). When an outline font

372-458: A computer file containing scalable outline letterforms ( digital font ), in one of several common formats. Some typefaces, such as Verdana , are designed primarily for use on computer screens . Digital type became the dominant form of type in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font , or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font , also called

465-483: A distinguishing sign of the country of registration on the rear of the vehicle. This sign may either be placed separately from the registration plate or, after the convention was amended in 2006, may be incorporated into the vehicle registration plate. One of the main benefits of the convention for motorists is the obligation on signatory countries to recognise the legality of vehicles from other signatory countries. The following requirements must be met when driving outside

558-405: A font family is a set of fonts within the same typeface: for example Times Roman 8, Times Roman 10, Times Roman 12 etc. In web typography (using span style="font-family: ), a 'font family' equates to a 'typeface family' or even to a very broad category such as sans-serif that encompass many typeface families. Another way to look at the distinction between font and typeface is that a font

651-447: A blue section on the extreme left with EU circle of stars and the country code was introduced by Council Regulation (EC) No 2411/98 of 3 November 1998 and entered into force on 11 November 1998. It was based on a model registration plate which three member states had already introduced: Ireland (1991), Portugal (1992) and Germany (1994). Luxembourg plates had displayed the EU flag on

744-457: A bracketed serif and a substantial difference in weight within the strokes. Though some argument exists as to whether Transitional fonts exist as a discrete category among serif fonts, Transitional fonts lie somewhere between Old Style and Modern style typefaces. Transitional fonts exhibit a marked increase in the variation of stroke weight and a more horizontal serif compared to Old Style. Slab serif designs have particularly large serifs, and date to

837-451: A complementary set of numeric digits. Numbers can be typeset in two main independent sets of ways: lining and non-lining figures , and proportional and tabular styles. Most modern typefaces set numeric digits by default as lining figures, which are the height of upper-case letters. Non-lining figures , styled to match lower-case letters, are often common in fonts intended for body text, as they are thought to be less disruptive to

930-612: A comprehensive vocabulary for describing the many aspects of typefaces and typography. Some vocabulary applies only to a subset of all scripts . Serifs , for example, are a purely decorative characteristic of typefaces used for European scripts, whereas the glyphs used in Arabic or East Asian scripts have characteristics (such as stroke width) that may be similar in some respects but cannot reasonably be called serifs and may not be purely decorative. Typefaces can be divided into two main categories: serif and sans serif . Serifs comprise

1023-403: A distinguishing code for the country of registration on the rear of the vehicle. This sign may be an oval sticker placed separately from the registration plate, or may be incorporated into the plate. When the distinguishing sign is incorporated into the registration plate, it must also appear on the front plate of the vehicle, and may be supplemented with the flag or emblem of the national state, or

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1116-560: A distinguishing sign. If their country does not require a license plate, then the vehicle can cross borders without a license plate as well. Example: Swedish moped class II or the German insurance plate, which isn't an official license plate and only shows that insurance has been paid. After Brexit the European Commission confirmed that British cars with registration plates with the distinguishing sign incorporated do not need

1209-540: A document without changing the document's text flow are said to be "metrically identical" (or "metrically compatible"). Several typefaces have been created to be metrically compatible with widely used proprietary typefaces to allow the editing of documents set in such typefaces in digital typesetting environments where these typefaces are not available. For instance, the free and open-source Liberation fonts and Croscore fonts have been designed as metrically compatible substitutes for widely used Microsoft fonts. During

1302-453: A film strip (in the form of a film negative, with the letters as clear areas on an opaque black background). A high-intensity light source behind the film strip projected the image of each glyph through an optical system, which focused the desired letter onto the light-sensitive phototypesetting paper at a specific size and position. This photographic typesetting process permitted optical scaling , allowing designers to produce multiple sizes from

1395-439: A glyph rising above the x-height as the ascender . The distance from the baseline to the top of the ascent or a regular uppercase glyphs (cap line) is also known as the cap height. The height of the ascender can have a dramatic effect on the readability and appearance of a font. The ratio between the x-height and the ascent or cap height often serves to characterize typefaces. Typefaces that can be substituted for one another in

1488-596: A main typeface have been in use for centuries. In some formats they have been marketed as separate fonts. In the early 1990s, the Adobe Systems type group introduced the idea of expert set fonts, which had a standardized set of additional glyphs, including small caps , old style figures , and additional superior letters, fractions and ligatures not found in the main fonts for the typeface. Supplemental fonts have also included alternate letters such as swashes , dingbats , and alternate character sets, complementing

1581-678: A monospaced font for proper viewing, with the exception of Shift JIS art which takes advantage of the proportional characters in the MS PGothic font. In a web page , the <tt> </tt> , <code> </code> or <pre> </pre> HTML tags most commonly specify monospaced fonts. In LaTeX , the verbatim environment or the Teletype font family (e.g., \texttt{...} or {\ttfamily ...} ) uses monospaced fonts (in TeX , use {\tt ...} ). Any two lines of text with

1674-525: A new license plate which gets a license stamp to be valid on the road (the round stamp is placed between county code and the local registration code). In the vicinity of the vehicle registration offices several small shops compete to press a license plate on the spot – their printing machines are highly standardized and the German license plate design is tailored to allow for cheap production in high quality. Specifically in Europe some countries started to adopt

1767-467: A perfect match for the automatic number-plate recognition technology that had developed to a usable state at the time. Some of the federal states in the eastern part of Germany introduced the new design during 1994 in anticipation of the national resolution. In January 1995 it was introduced nationwide by a federal law that came to include the FE-Schrift as well as it had been in the planning since

1860-735: A project over a couple of years — running from the functional scope document being created in 1977 to the final decision of 1982 to not introduce the design on license plates. It ended up in the drawer. The final publication in German law for the usage on license plates includes three variants – normal script ( Mittelschrift ) with 75 mm high and 47.5 mm wide letters and 44.5 mm wide digits ( 2 + 15 ⁄ 16  in ×  1 + 7 ⁄ 8  in ×  1 + 3 ⁄ 4  in), narrow script ( Engschrift ) with 75 mm high and 40.5 mm wide letters and 38.5 wide digits ( 2 + 15 ⁄ 16  in ×  1 + 5 ⁄ 8  in ×  1 + 1 ⁄ 2  in) and

1953-406: A result of revival, such as Linotype Syntax , Linotype Univers ; while others have alternate styling designed as compatible replacements of each other, such as Compatil , Generis . Font superfamilies began to emerge when foundries began to include typefaces with significant structural differences, but some design relationship, under the same general family name. Arguably the first superfamily

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2046-503: A separate sign when driving in EU countries party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. If the registration plate does not include the distinguishing sign, or if the vehicle is driven in an EU country not party to the Vienna Convention, a separate sign has to be displayed at the rear of the vehicle. All EU countries except Cyprus, Ireland, Malta and Spain are party to the convention. Some European countries are not party to

2139-433: A single font, although physical constraints on the reproduction system used still required design changes at different sizes; for example, ink traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink encountered in the printing stage. Manually operated photocomposition systems using fonts on filmstrips allowed fine kerning between letters without the physical effort of manual typesetting, and spawned an enlarged type design industry in

2232-631: A single size. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. Historically, a font came from a type foundry as a set of " sorts ", with number of copies of each character included. As the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants (most commonly regular or roman as distinct from italic , as well as condensed ) have led to font families , collections of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles. A typeface family

2325-404: A small script ( verkleinerte Mittelschrift ) with 49 mm high and 31 mm wide letters and 29 mm wide digits ( 2 + 5 ⁄ 16  in ×  1 + 1 ⁄ 4  in ×  1 + 1 ⁄ 8  in). The legal typeface includes umlaut vowels as these occur in German county codes at the start of the license plate number. The narrow font allows nine characters to be put on

2418-702: A special design of vanity plates. In other countries, such as Algeria and Ireland, FE-Schrift is permissible where registration plates are owner provided, under their prescribed design regulations. Such plates were allowed in India until 2019. Some countries have developed a typeface for license plates with similar features: Albania since 2002, Georgia since 2014, Guinea , Hungary since 2022, New Zealand , Netherlands , Serbia and Slovenia (from 2004 until 2008). Typeface There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces

2511-444: A specific size is known as optical sizing . Others will be offered in only one style, but optimised for a specific size. Optical sizes are particularly common for serif fonts, since the fine detail of serif fonts can need to be bulked up for smaller sizes. Typefaces may also be designed differently considering the type of paper on which they will be printed. Designs to be printed on absorbent newsprint paper will be more slender as

2604-596: A standard Euro license plate — shorter numbers are supposed to be printed with larger spaces between characters as to fill the available space on the plate. The German law defines the font in Anlage 4 ('appendix 4') of the Fahrzeugzulassungsverordnung ('vehicle admission ordinance'). In section 2.1 it shows three names for it as fälschungserschwerende Schrift , FE-Schrift and Schrift für Kfz-Kennzeichen ('font for license plates') with

2697-488: A standard feature of so-called monospaced fonts , used in programming and on typewriters. However, many fonts that are not monospaced use tabular figures. More complex font designs may include two or more combinations with one as the default and others as alternate characters. Of the four possibilities, non-lining tabular figures are particularly rare since there is no common use for them. Fonts intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make

2790-422: A typeface. Typefaces with serifs are often considered easier to read in long passages than those without. Studies on the matter are ambiguous, suggesting that most of this effect is due to the greater familiarity of serif typefaces. As a general rule, printed works such as newspapers and books almost always use serif typefaces, at least for the text body. Websites do not have to specify a font and can simply respect

2883-521: Is a metal or plastic plate or plates attached to a motor vehicle or trailer for official identification purposes. The registration identifier is a numeric or alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies the vehicle within the issuing authority's database. In Europe most countries have adopted a format for registration plates that satisfies the requirements in the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic , which states that cross-border vehicles must display

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2976-543: Is called type design . Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries . In desktop publishing , type designers are sometimes also called "font developers" or "font designers" (a typographer is someone who uses typefaces to design a page layout). Every typeface is a collection of glyphs , each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different writing systems , e.g. Roman uppercase A looks

3069-480: Is derived from the compound German adjective f älschungs e rschwerend combining the noun Fälschung ('falsification') and the verb erschweren ('to hinder'). Schrift means ' font ' in German (cognate with the English word script ). Other countries have later introduced the same or a derived typeface for license plates taking advantage of the proven design for the FE-Schrift . The motivation for

3162-457: Is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size. The first "extended" font families, which included a wide range of widths and weights in the same general style emerged in the early 1900s, starting with ATF 's Cheltenham (1902–1913), with an initial design by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and many additional faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton . Later examples include Futura , Lucida , ITC Officina . Some became superfamilies as

3255-462: Is not completely successful and there are occasional difficulties in connection with parking fines and automatic speed cameras. Individual European countries use differing numbering schemes and text fonts : The plate must be at +/-5° to the longitudinal plane of the vehicle. Lower edge must be higher than 0.3m and upper edge lower than 1.2m. According to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic , vehicles in cross-border traffic are obliged to display

3348-471: Is still used by TeX and its variants. Applications using these font formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple Computer operating systems , Adobe Systems products and those of several other companies. Digital fonts are created with font editors such as FontForge , RoboFont, Glyphs, Fontlab 's TypeTool, FontLab Studio, Fontographer, or AsiaFont Studio. Typographers have developed

3441-419: Is the name of the class of typefaces used with the earliest printing presses in Europe, which imitated the calligraphy style of that time and place. Various forms exist including textualis , rotunda , schwabacher and fraktur . (Some people refer to Blackletter as " gothic script " or "gothic font", though the term "Gothic" in typography refers to sans serif typefaces. ) Gaelic fonts were first used for

3534-463: Is the vessel (e.g. the software) that allows you to use a set of characters with a given appearance, whereas a typeface is the actual design of such characters. Therefore, a given typeface, such as Times, may be rendered by different fonts, such as computer font files created by this or that vendor, a set of metal type characters etc. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction

3627-457: Is typically a group of related typefaces which vary only in weight, orientation, width , etc., but not design. For example, Times is a typeface family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are individual typefaces making up the Times family. Typeface families typically include several typefaces, though some, such as Helvetica , may consist of dozens of fonts. In traditional typography,

3720-410: Is used, a rasterizing routine (in the application software, operating system or printer) renders the character outlines, interpreting the vector instructions to decide which pixels should be black and which ones white. Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions such as those used by laser printers and in high-end publishing systems. For computer screens , where each individual pixel can mean

3813-510: The Irish language in 1571, and were used regularly for Irish until the early 1960s, though they continue to be used in display type and type for signage. Their use was effectively confined to Ireland, though Gaelic typefaces were designed and produced in France, Belgium, and Italy. Gaelic typefaces make use of insular letterforms, and early fonts made use of a variety of abbreviations deriving from

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3906-472: The cap-height , the height of the capital letters. Font size is also commonly measured in millimeters (mm) and q s (a quarter of a millimeter, kyu in romanized Japanese) and inches. Type foundries have cast fonts in lead alloys from the 1450s until the present, although wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type during the 19th century, particularly in the United States . In

3999-579: The 1890s, the mechanization of typesetting allowed automated casting of fonts on the fly as lines of type in the size and length needed. This was known as continuous casting, and remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first machine of this type was the Linotype machine , invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler . During a brief transitional period ( c.  1950s –1990s), photographic technology, known as phototypesetting , utilized tiny high-resolution images of individual glyphs on

4092-521: The 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1970s, all of the major typeface technologies and all their fonts were in use: letterpress; continuous casting machines; phototypositors; computer-controlled phototypesetters; and the earliest digital typesetters – bulky machines with primitive processors and CRT outputs. From the mid-1980s, as digital typography has grown, users have almost universally adopted the American spelling font , which has come to primarily refer to

4185-474: The 1970s. The shift in legislation matches with the first Schengen zone to lift borders during 1995. With the extension of the Schengen zone in 1998 the new license plate design found EU-wide acceptance (even for non-Schengen countries) thereby lifting the older requirement of adding an extra country code plate on the car when roaming to other countries which constitutes an advantage to citizens. Shortly later

4278-512: The DIN typeface. Other countries have begun to introduce a forgery-impeding script as well, either taking over the FE-Schrift or using a derivative variant. Taking over the original design, including the Euro license plate format, is generally cost effective – while in many countries the car license plates are produced by the state it is not the case in Germany. In Germany the car owner has to pay for

4371-477: The EU format, with national flags or symbols in place of the circle of stars, plus the country code. Vehicles with such registration plates, issued in countries party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic , do not need to display the white oval international vehicle registration code while within countries signatory to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. Several countries have made efforts to avoid duplicating registration numbers used by other countries. This

4464-543: The EU membership. In October 2014 the members of the Mercosur South American trade bloc agreed to introduce a common design for license plates. They adopted a size of 400 millimetres (16 in) x 130 millimetres (5.1 in) similar to that used in Australia and China . The design uses the narrow script Engschrift FE-Schrift design to show the registration code with 7 elements. The FE-Schrift

4557-618: The Mercosur design by 2016. The actual introduction was delayed until 2018. The early adoption in Africa is based on proposals against falsified and stolen license plates made by the German Utsch AG , which had also developed the retroreflective plates for Germany, and which was able to deliver the embossing machines for plates with FE-Schrift as they were already in mass production for the national market in 1994/95. In South Africa

4650-658: The University of Giessen (Department of Physiology and Cybernetic Psychology). For example, the initial slashed zero ( ∅ {\displaystyle \emptyset } ) could be mistaken for an 8, so Hoefer replaced it by a design with a reduced white slash in the upper right corner. Whilst the DIN typeface was using a proportional font , the FE-Schrift is a monospaced font (with different spacing for letters and numbers) for improved machine readability. Faked FE-Schrift letters (e.g., "P" to "R") appear conspicuously disproportionate. Another motivation for

4743-505: The Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. Cyprus, Ireland, Malta and Spain are examples of non-signatory countries. Those who have not ratified the convention may be parties to the older 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic , which is the case of the aforementioned countries. According to the Geneva convention, a distinguishing sign of the country of registration must be displayed on the rear of the vehicle. This sign must be placed separately from

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4836-455: The baseline and the top of the glyph that reaches farthest from the baseline. The ascent and descent may or may not include distance added by accents or diacritical marks. In the Latin , Greek and Cyrillic (sometimes collectively referred to as LGC) scripts, one can refer to the distance from the baseline to the top of regular lowercase glyphs ( mean line ) as the x-height , and the part of

4929-449: The bold-style tabular figures take up the same width as the regular (non-bold) numbers, so a bold-style total would appear just as wide as the same sum in regular style. Because an abundance of typefaces has been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized according to their appearance. At the highest level (in the context of Latin-script fonts), one can differentiate Roman, Blackletter, and Gaelic types. Roman types are in

5022-399: The browser settings of the user. But of those web sites that do specify a font, most use modern sans serif fonts, because it is commonly believed that, in contrast to the case for printed material, sans serif fonts are easier than serif fonts to read on the low-resolution computer screen. A proportional typeface, also called variable-width typeface, contains glyphs of varying widths, while

5115-468: The characters i, t, l, and 1) use less space than the average. In the publishing industry, it was once the case that editors read manuscripts in monospaced fonts (typically Courier ) for ease of editing and word count estimates, and it was considered discourteous to submit a manuscript in a proportional font. This has become less universal in recent years, such that authors need to check with editors as to their preference, though monospaced fonts are still

5208-610: The characters which were missing on either Macintosh or Windows computers, e.g. fractions, ligatures or some accented glyphs. The goal was to deliver the whole character set to the customer regardless of which operating system was used. The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points ; point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing point of 1 ⁄ 72  in (0.0139 in or 0.35 mm). When specified in typographic sizes (points, kyus),

5301-493: The country of registration: The common EU format of having a blue section on the extreme left with EU circle of stars and the country code was introduced by Council Regulation (EC) No 2411/98 of 3 November 1998 and entered into force on 11 November 1998. According to Article 3 of the regulation shall member states that require vehicles registered in another member state to display a distinguishing registration sign also recognise distinguishing signs issued in accordance with

5394-608: The creation of the typeface arose in the late 1970s in the light of terrorism by the Red Army Faction when it was discovered that with the then-standard font for vehicle registration plates—the DIN 1451 font—it was particularly easy to modify letters by applying a small amount of black paint or tape. For example, it was easy to change a "P" to an "R" or "B", a "3" to an "8", or an "L" or "F" to an "E". Modifications to FE-font plates are somewhat more difficult, as they also require

5487-524: The difference between legible and illegible characters, some digital fonts use hinting algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes. Digital fonts may also contain data representing the metrics used for composition, including kerning pairs, component creation data for accented characters, glyph substitution rules for Arabic typography and for connecting script faces, and for simple everyday ligatures like "fl". Common font formats include TrueType , OpenType and PostScript Type 1 , while Metafont

5580-434: The early nineteenth century. The earliest known slab serif font was first shown around 1817 by the English typefounder Vincent Figgins . Roman , italic , and oblique are also terms used to differentiate between upright and two possible slanted forms of a typeface. Italic and oblique fonts are similar (indeed, oblique fonts are often simply called italics) but there is strictly a difference: italic applies to fonts where

5673-513: The emblem of the regional economic integration organisation to which the country belongs. An example of such format is the common EU format, with the EU flag above the country code issued in EU member states . The vast majority of European countries issue registration plates that are: This is one of the basic standard sizes worldwide. The others are: Some European countries use registration plates in other formats: The common EU format of having

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5766-423: The empty license plates had been delivered with a special certification mark from the beginning, which would tell if a plate is authorized for embossing by licensed plate makers (today the certification mark contains a QR code ). In other regions the car owner will get a third "license plate mark" being a sticker for the front window that can not be removed non-destructively and where the sticker does also contain all

5859-537: The features at the ends of their strokes. Times New Roman and Garamond are common examples of serif typefaces. Serif fonts are probably the most used class in printed materials, including most books, newspapers and magazines. Serif fonts are often classified into three subcategories: Old Style , Transitional , and Didone (or Modern), representative examples of which are Garamond , Baskerville , and Bodoni respectively. Old Style typefaces are influenced by early Italian lettering design. Modern fonts often exhibit

5952-520: The glyphs found in brush calligraphy during the Tang dynasty. These later evolved into the Song style (宋体字) which used thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal strokes in wood block printing. Vehicle registration plates of Europe A vehicle registration plate , also known as a number plate ( British English ), license plate or licence plate ( American English and Canadian English respectively),

6045-574: The height of an em-square , an invisible box which is typically a bit larger than the distance from the tallest ascender to the lowest descender , is scaled to equal the specified size. For example, when setting Helvetica at 12 point, the em square defined in the Helvetica font is scaled to 12 points or 1 ⁄ 6  in or 4.2 mm. Yet no particular element of 12-point Helvetica need measure exactly 12 points. Frequently measurement in non-typographic units (feet, inches, meters) will be of

6138-427: The ink will naturally spread out as it absorbs into the paper, and may feature ink traps : areas left blank into which the ink will soak as it dries. These corrections will not be needed for printing on high-gloss cardboard or display on-screen. Fonts designed for low-resolution displays, meanwhile, may avoid pure circles, fine lines and details a screen cannot render. Most typefaces, especially modern designs, include

6231-466: The latter to be used for requesting templates from the Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen ( BASt , 'Federal Highway Research Institute'). Digital variants have never been published by them but there exist third party digitizations for free download, for example the font "Euro Plate". When the FE-Schrift was finished in 1980 the pressure for its adoption had lessened already. Its distribution

6324-526: The left since 1988. Vehicles with registration plates in the EU format do not need to display the white oval international vehicle registration code while within the European Economic Area , or in countries party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic (except if the plate is issued in Cyprus, Ireland, Malta and Spain). Several non-EU European states have implemented formats similar to

6417-403: The letter forms are redesigned, not just slanted. Almost all serif faces have italic forms; some sans-serif faces have oblique designs. (Most faces do not offer both as this is an artistic choice by the font designer about how the slanted form should look.) Sans serif (lit. without serif) designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design. The first, similar to slab serif designs,

6510-461: The license plate information (some of latest variants even integrate an RFID chip containing the information). Some countries allow the FE-Schrift as an alternative to the standard typeface especially in combination with a Euro-style license plate. Some license plates in Ghana have been issued using an FE-Schrift style. In Australia, personalized plates may be issued with an FE-Schrift using

6603-433: The manuscript tradition. Various forms exist, including manuscript, traditional, and modern styles, chiefly distinguished as having angular or uncial features. Monospaced fonts are typefaces in which every glyph is the same width (as opposed to variable-width fonts, where the w and m are wider than most letters, and the i is narrower). The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move

6696-400: The metal type era, all type was cut in metal and could only be printed at a specific size. It was a natural process to vary a design at different sizes, making it chunkier and clearer to read at smaller sizes. Many digital typefaces are offered with a range of fonts (or a variable font axis) for different sizes, especially designs sold for professional design use. The art of designing fonts for

6789-754: The most widespread use today, and are sub-classified as serif, sans serif, ornamental, and script types. Historically, the first European fonts were blackletter, followed by Roman serif, then sans serif and then the other types. The use of Gaelic faces was restricted to the Irish language, though these form a unique if minority class. Typefaces may be monospaced regardless of whether they are Roman, Blackletter, or Gaelic. Symbol typefaces are non-alphabetic. The Cyrillic script comes in two varieties, Roman-appearance type (called гражданский шрифт graždanskij šrift ) and traditional Slavonic type (called славянский шрифт slavjanskij šrift ). Serif, or Roman , typefaces are named for

6882-462: The new typeface came from a spike in the theft rate of license plates in the early 1970s. And despite the requirement to hinder falsification, the scope document did list that point only in the second place. The first priority was a requirement for readability by humans and machines as the decade was the same that saw the development of other typefaces for optical character recognition , namely OCR-A and OCR-B . The RAF terrorism however allowed to fund

6975-410: The norm. Most scripts share the notion of a baseline : an imaginary horizontal line on which characters rest. In some scripts, parts of glyphs lie below the baseline. The descent spans the distance between the baseline and the lowest descending glyph in a typeface, and the part of a glyph that descends below the baseline has the name descender . Conversely, the ascent spans the distance between

7068-494: The numbers to blend into the text more effectively. As tabular spacing makes all numbers with the same number of digits the same width, it is used for typesetting documents such as price lists, stock listings and sums in mathematics textbooks, all of which require columns of numeric figures to line up on top of each other for easier comparison. Tabular spacing is also a common feature of simple printing devices such as cash registers and date-stamps. Characters of uniform width are

7161-509: The option to be issued an old (non-Euro) license plate design were dropped on 1 November 2000 and the legislation dropped the older typeface for license plates alongside. The FE-Schrift is mandatory in Germany since that time although older license plates continue to be valid. There is an exception for historic cars to get a new license plate in the DIN typeface, and the Bundeswehr armed forces continue to generally issue their plates in

7254-439: The registration plate and may not be incorporated into the vehicle registration plate. The letters shall be in black on a white background having the shape of an ellipse with the major axis horizontal. Vehicle registration plates of each country are described in the following table: Motorcycle plates are used for motorcycles and vehicles where mounting space is an issue, such as taxis which display their taxi licence plate beside

7347-427: The regular fonts under the same family. However, with introduction of font formats such as OpenType , those supplemental glyphs were merged into the main fonts, relying on specific software capabilities to access the alternate glyphs. Since Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems supported different character sets in the platform related fonts, some foundries used expert fonts in a different way. These fonts included

7440-402: The regulation (the common EU format). After the amendment of the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic in 2006, registration plates issued in the common EU format also satisfies the requirements of the named convention and hence is also valid in all countries party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic (if the issuing country is party to the convention). Mopeds are exempt, and do not need to wear

7533-510: The same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha (Α). There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as cartography , astrology or mathematics . In professional typography , the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font (originally "fount" in British English, and pronounced "font"), because the term font has historically been defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in

7626-806: The same distance forward with each letter typed. Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font. Although modern computers can display any desired typeface, monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming , terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents; they may also be particularly legible at small sizes due to all characters being quite wide. Examples of monospaced typefaces are Courier , Prestige Elite , Fixedsys , and Monaco . Most monospaced fonts are sans-serif or slab-serif as these designs are easiest to read printed small or display on low-resolution screens, though many exceptions exist. CJK, or Chinese, Japanese and Korean typefaces consist of large sets of glyphs. These typefaces originate in

7719-399: The same number of characters in each line in a monospaced typeface should display as equal in width, while the same two lines in a proportional typeface may have radically different widths. This occurs because in a proportional font, glyph widths vary, such that wider glyphs (typically those for characters such as W, Q, Z, M, D, O, H, and U) use more space, and narrower glyphs (such as those for

7812-575: The same reason, GUI computer applications (such as word processors and web browsers ) typically use proportional fonts. However, many proportional fonts contain fixed-width ( tabular ) numerals so that columns of numbers stay aligned. Monospaced typefaces function better for some purposes because their glyphs line up in neat, regular columns. No glyph is given any more weight than another. Most manually operated typewriters use monospaced fonts. So do text-only computer displays and third- and fourth-generation game console graphics processors, which treat

7905-517: The screen as a uniform grid of character cells. Most computer programs which have a text-based interface ( terminal emulators , for example) use only monospaced fonts (or add additional spacing to proportional fonts to fit them in monospaced cells) in their configuration. Monospaced fonts are commonly used by computer programmers for displaying and editing source code so that certain characters (for example parentheses used to group arithmetic expressions) are easy to see. ASCII art usually requires

7998-551: The small features at the end of strokes within letters. The printing industry refers to typeface without serifs as sans serif (from French sans , meaning without ), or as grotesque (or, in German , grotesk ). Great variety exists among both serif and sans serif typefaces. Both groups contain faces designed for setting large amounts of body text, and others intended primarily as decorative. The presence or absence of serifs represents only one of many factors to consider when choosing

8091-474: The style of registration plates of the European Union even before becoming full members. The main difference is that EU registrations plates may bear a circle of stars as present in the European Union flag. The usage of stars is however completely optional, even after becoming a full member. The license plates may not need to be changed to be valid but new license plates may be issued with that hint to

8184-411: The style of running text. They are also called lower-case numbers or text figures for the same reason. The horizontal spacing of digits can also be proportional , with a character width tightly matching the width of the figure itself, or tabular , where all digits have the same width. Proportional spacing places the digits closely together, reducing empty space in a document, and is thought to allow

8277-512: The use of white paint, which is easily distinguished at a distance from the retroreflective white background of the plate, in particular at night. The original design for the FE-Schrift typeface was created by Karlgeorg Hoefer who was working for the Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen (Federal Highway Institute of Germany) at the time. The typeface was slightly modified according to the results of tests that lasted from 1978 to 1980 at

8370-640: Was created when Morris Fuller Benton created Clearface Gothic for ATF in 1910, a sans serif companion to the existing (serifed) Clearface. The superfamily label does not include quite different designs given the same family name for what would seem to be purely marketing, rather than design, considerations: Caslon Antique , Futura Black and Futura Display are structurally unrelated to the Caslon and Futura families, respectively, and are generally not considered part of those families by typographers, despite their names. Additional or supplemental glyphs intended to match

8463-522: Was found to perform better against alteration and falsification in comparison to the Brazilian Mandatory script as shown in a test at the INTI . The design also includes a blue strip above the registration code with the Mercosur emblem in the left upper corner, the national flag of the member state in the right upper corner, and the country name printed in the center. It was agreed to introduce

8556-574: Was furthered by another event being the introduction of the Euro license plate . With the fall of the Iron Curtain there was again a spike in the theft rate of license plates, including cars being stolen and moved to Eastern Europe. Again there was a motivation to prevent that with new regulations on license plates. In the new process the officials found the FE-Schrift which was fully developed and

8649-460: Was shown in 1816 by William Caslon IV. Many have minimal variation in stroke width, creating the impression of a minimal, simplified design. When first introduced, the faces were disparaged as "grotesque" (or "grotesk") and "gothic": but by the late nineteenth century were commonly used for san-serif without negative implication. The major sub-classes of Sans-serif are " Grotesque ", " Neo-grotesque ", " Geometric " and " Humanist ". "Blackletter"

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