Janson text font free archive#

It defends his somewhat contentious choices of editing and orthography in his Hungarian printing. Revivals Ī book printed by Kis in Kolozsvár (modern name Cluj-Napoca) in 1697, after his return to Transylvania. It has also been used for the Journal of the British Printing Historical Society. As of the magazine's 2011 redesign, Architectural Digest uses Janson for body text in all of its articles so does Philosophy Now. In his book Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Uses, Updike commented that 'although heavy, they retain considerable vivacity of line and have great capabilities when used with taste.' ĭespite its 17th-century origins, Janson is used in a wide variety of modern-day text applications. Due to their survival, the Janson typefaces became popular with fine printers of the late Arts and Crafts period such as Updike, who could print books from them using hand-set type cast from surviving original matrices.

Janson text font free archive#

Kis's identity as the maker of the typefaces was rediscovered in the 1950s by comparison with type from Hungarian archive sources (including his autobiography) on which his name was identified. Kis's surviving matrices were first acquired by Stempel, and are now held in the collection of the Druckmuseum (Museum of Printing), Darmstadt. The Ehrhardt type foundry of Leipzig released a surviving specimen sheet of them around 1720, leading to the attribution to Janson. Kis returned to Transylvania around 1689 and may have left matrices (the moulds used to cast type) in Leipzig on his way home. Kis also cut typefaces for other languages including Greek and Hebrew typefaces. Kis is considered to have been one of the most talented engravers active during this period, and perhaps uniquely wrote about his work in later life, allowing greater insight into his work than other earlier engravers. It was later called the ' Dutch taste' ( goût hollandois), a term originating from the writings of Pierre Simon Fournier in the next century. The style he worked in was based on French serif typefaces of the previous century, but with boosted x-height and higher stroke contrast, creating a higher-contrast, sharper effect. He developed a second career as a punchcutter, an engraver of the punches used as a master for stamping matrices for casting metal type, selling his work to printers in the Netherlands and abroad. This was a period of considerable prosperity for the Netherlands and a time when its styles of printing were very influential across Europe, making it a centre for the creation of new typefaces.

Miklós Kis, a Transylvanian Protestant pastor and schoolmaster, became deeply interested in printing after being sent to Amsterdam to help print a Hungarian Protestant translation of the Bible.