Recreating historical fonts as a vector image... how?

[Stevenlgts]

I am trying to recreate the text used in patents back in the mid-1800s. I have found it extremely difficult to do with Affinity Designer and Illustrator (in the past). I have purchased Affinity Designer for the MAC but I fall into the casual user category. I have scanned the internet for help with little luck. I am not trying to create a new font set but just trying to create a clean copy of the attached United States Patent Office text as a vector image or whatever works the easiest. This is being used to recreate some old patents since very clean and crisp copies are not available. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Steve

[DWright]

the closest fonts I could find for this text is Nice Initials font for the first letter and Archive Chased black font for the rest of the text

[Wosven]

This example could be use to design part of them: Textualis.

And the capitals look a lot like the terrible Old English font + embellishments

[gdenby]

This topic was interesting to me, so I spent a few hours searching around. Nothing very good to report. I found just one other image with that letterhead.  It was equally useless for manual or automatic tracing.

Tried to find an old "specimen" book. There were 2 at the internet archive. One from the Cleveland type foundry c. 1890, and another from the American type foundry, c 1910. Neither had anything quite like the older US Patent Office font. A few were close, out of hundreds of examples. But no match.  Check out the "Boston Black" from the Cleveland Type Foundry, pg 221. It may be possible to interpolate the good quality scans of that w. the patent office banner, and make a hand trace. Evidently, the old blackletter style was no longer common by then.

From what I've found at other times, I suppose the example was from a one off design the Patent Office used for a few years. I didn't find today, or see any other time, embellished Caps like those. Any skilled calligrapher was supposed to make embellishments on the fly.

Another possible guide:

[Stevenlgts]

Thank you for the effort and comments so far. I'm still kind of stymied on this one. I guess as a last ditch effort I can do my best recreation and hope for the best! 

[firstdefence]

@Stevenlgts Do you have a larger scan that I could have a play with?

[Stevenlgts]

@firstdefence This is the best that I can do based on captures from scanned patents. I included several samples. Thanks for the interest and help!

Steve

[Alfred]

It’s quite similar to Cloister Black, but the capitals look relatively condensed (and they have flourishes added).

The above version of Cloister Black by Dieter Steffmann is available for free from FontSpace:

http://www.fontspace.com/dieter-steffmann/cloister-black

I set the tracking to 50‰ and condensed the capitals by setting their horizontal scale to 75%.

[firstdefence]

14 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

It’s quite similar to Cloister Black, but the capitals look relatively condensed (and they have flourishes added).

The above version of Cloister Black by Dieter Steffmann is available for free from FontSpace:

http://www.fontspace.com/dieter-steffmann/cloister-black

I set the tracking to 50‰ and condensed the capitals by setting their horizontal scale to 75%.

That's pretty close, I've found an old book with a Font called Shaw text series and the lowercase letters are more in keeping with the scanned lettering, especially the 'f' 

The n, e, and a also look much more like the scanned lettering.

[Wosven]

18 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

…

I set the tracking to 50‰ and condensed the capitals by setting their horizontal scale to 75%.

The "United States Patent Office" is a really bad use of blackletters with a terrible design and too much spaces between letters for a calligraphy that was created for having them with as little space as possible. Getting a prettier version like yours wouldn't hurt the eyes. But they need to be a little bolder.

[gdenby]

38 minutes ago, Wosven said:

The "United States Patent Office" is a really bad use of blackletters with a terrible design and too much spaces between letters for a calligraphy that was created for having them with as little space as possible. Getting a prettier version like yours wouldn't hurt the eyes. But they need to be a little bolder.

I wonder if blackletter as calligraphy can be readily translated to lead type. Maybe thats why the spacing was so large. 

[Wosven]

14 minutes ago, gdenby said:

I wonder if blackletter as calligraphy can be readily translated to lead type. Maybe thats why the spacing was so large. 

There's really no problem with it for print. As a font, it's like some cursive, it need knowledge from people who use it, to understand how it should look like.

A highter resolution example here.

That's like people using decorative capitals to write full sentences Some understand naturally it's not the purpose of the font, and some can't. Not everyone's got a eye for font. (Some people can't distinguish between serif and sans-serif!)

Edited August 29, 2018 by Wosven
Added 2d example.

[firstdefence]

Been looking through old Specimens. Fascinating to look through.

I think most of these are from 1860

[Wosven]

7 minutes ago, firstdefence said:



Those are my favourite. The first one because it's elegant and improve lisibility.
The 3 below are a nice modernisation with the inteded 3D effect (sort of).

The last one I didn't quoted looks like a pitifull attempt by someone that didn't had any instruction before trying to do this sort of calligraphy

The first with the lettrine is from an interesting period (Art & craft | Art nouveau), with a lot of new ideas, patterns and new designs I'm fond of.

[Wosven]

Do you have full examples with blackletters?

I could only finds recents ones like those sold as posters (interesting design).

 

Oops! I found one: Spoon.

[Markus Allen]

Time for a giveback...

I am so appreciative of Affinity and this forum, that I took a few moments to recreate this into an Affinity Designer file.

I have attached it for you.

I deleted most of the "dirt" - left a few splotches in case you want it for the design. Of course, just use the Move tool (arrow) to select and hit the trashcan to delete any object.

United-States-Patent-Office Copy.afdesign

[gdenby]

Thank you for your pay back. Hope it is something you can use.

[firstdefence]

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

Do you have full examples with blackletters?

I could only finds recents ones like those sold as posters (interesting design).

 

Oops! I found one: Spoon.

Unfortunately not, but I feel like I'm on the right track, I wanted to find better images so that the nuances of the font can be seen to be better identified.

[Stevenlgts]

I must say that all the replies so far have been truly awesome. I am glad to see others find these fonts interesting since they are pretty much lost in time. I have looked through old census records and have found some people with amazingly elegant handwriting. 

I do believe the Cloister Black that Alfred found looks to be a good starting point. The next step is to modify the text with all the extra flair and embellishments. 

[Stevenlgts]

31 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Unfortunately not, but I feel like I'm on the right track, I wanted to find better images so that the nuances of the font can be seen to be better identified.

I was playing around with overlaying several images of the same patent text from different patents over each other with the hopes that it would 'clarify' the text. It sounded easy in my head but turned into a monster in reality. Resizing, rotating then making transparent... ugh.  

[h_d]

I managed this with a bit of fiddling about from the Spoon document linked by @Wosven:

There are some gaps in the finer lines (especially on the upper-case P) which could be drawn in.

Incidentally, on that Spoon document is one of the classic jokes of British television: 

 

 

 

[firstdefence]

Just been setting up to emulate the Capital letters and took a look at the Cloisters Black Font from Alfreds Link, to say its a poor facsimile is an understatement, see the screenshot of the curve copied from Glyphs to Affinity, this isn't Affinity messing it up its the same in Glyphs, very bad work.

Curves in Affinity.

In Glyphs

I have snails in my garden that can draw straighter lines lol!

[firstdefence]

Had a bit of time to doodle and got a close...ish shape for the S

 

[firstdefence]

Bit more doodling, This time it's the Capital U. Obviously these are nowhere near perfect but its a start.

 

United States Patent Office.afdesign

[Stevenlgts]

@firstdefenceWow, that looks awesome!  Did you happen to see the email from the Affinity Team about downloading the beta for Affinity Publisher?