Bitstream Charter is a serif typeface designed by

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is a British type designer.A Man of Letters

in 1987 for

Bitstream Inc. Bitstream Inc. was a type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker among others. It was located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The font business, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype ...

Charter is based on

Pierre-Simon Fournier Pierre-Simon Fournier (15 September 1712 – 8 October 1768) was a French people, French mid-18th century punch-cutting, punch-cutter, type foundry, typefounder and typography, typographic theoretician. He was both a collector and originator of typ ...

’s characters, originating from the 18th century. Classified by Bitstream as a transitional-serif typeface (Bitstream Transitional 801), it also has features of a

slab-serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

typeface and is often classified as such. Charter was originally optimized for printing on the low-resolution 300 dpi laser printers of the 1980s, and remains suitable for printing on both modern high-resolution laser printers and inexpensive lower resolution inkjet printers due to its strong, legible design. Its structure was optimised for low-memory computers and printers. In a 2013 interview, Carter explained that it used "a very simplified structure and a minimum number of curves, more straight-line segments... very economical compared to, say, Times New Roman," but noted that rapid development of printers made this unnecessary even before he had finished the design. In its simplification of serif forms, it foreshadowed Carter's later landmark design,

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to t ...

for Microsoft. In 1992 Bitstream donated a version of Charter, along with its version of Courier, to the

X Consortium The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

under terms that allowed the font to be modified and redistributed. This has resulted in open source derivatives of Bitstream Charter, including

Charis SIL Charis SIL is a transitional serif typeface developed by SIL International based on Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed for laser printers. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Its design goa ...

. Some consider Bitstream Charter to be one of the best free fonts available. Because of its popularity, a new Charter Pro release of the typeface was released in 2004, with an expanded character set including additional symbols, ranging figures (old-style) and small capitals. This version was later added as a system font on

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. Carter was later asked by Monotype to consider releasing a sans-serif companion to Charter. Finding his attempts unsatisfying, he scrapped the idea for a more radical, less directly complementary design, Carter Sans.

History

Charter is based on the characters of

, a French 18th century punch-cutter, typefounder and typographic theoretician who invented the “point system”, a standardized measurement system for font sizes. Type sample, Pierre Simon Fournier, Manuel Typographique 1766

Type sample, Pierre Simon Fournier, Manuel Typographique 1766

References

External links

* Origina
Bitstream Charter

Type 1 font PostScript fonts are font files encoded in outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting. This system uses PostScript file format to encode font information. "PostScript fonts" may also separately ...

maintained by the X.Org Foundation
Free Bitstream Charter as OTF, TTF and webfonts

Updated Bitstream Charter for sale on MyFonts

Graphic Content: Carter Sans
by Steven Heller, New York Times, February 2, 2011 {{free and open-source typography Transitional serif typefaces Slab serif typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1987 Typefaces designed by Matthew Carter International Typeface Corporation typefaces