NewDeal Hot Tip 1402

[Hot Tips for...] Fonts

Fonts, Roman and Cranbrook

URW Roman is basically a derivative of the Times Roman typeface that has been around forever. A lot of newspapers and periodicals used this typeface back when printing was done on the old manual presses of years gone by and some still do. This is a standard typeface that goes back a long time.

Cranbrook is a derivative of Century Schoolbook, which is also an older fonts, but it found its life more in books and comes from the Times Roman serif style family. A great number of books today are printed using this font. It's easy to read, and prints at relatively small sizes without bunching characters together (especially important in paperbacks).

If you look carefully at the fonts with the same message at
the same type size, you'll start to see the differences. Cranbrook is spaced farther apart, the letters are individually a bit wider, and even a bit taller.

The flags on the i, h, and other characters that have serif edging, are more horizontal in Cranbrook. In URW Roman those same serifs are more angled downward. For example:

I comparison

In summary, Times Roman is more of a headline or title font, while Cranbrook is more of a body-of-the-text font.


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Last Modified 2 Mar 1999