Making or Finding vintage keycap font

[ac2ev]

How hard is it to make a keyboard font?

I'm going to customize a WASD keyboard and I was looking around and found someone had made some nice keycaps like the http://pimpmykeyboard.com/sa-1976-keycap-set/
While I'm not a fan of the color scheme I like the font. $10 per key is a bit steep*. From what I can find it's a Gorton modified font. The name apparently is just the name of the manufacturer of the typesetting machine that used the font.

Attached is an old keyboard I modified for USB. It's got a nice looking font though a little large. I like the slashed zero (Zed)

I guess what I'm asking is there a repository of old/industrial fonts? How hard is it to take a photo and vectorize the fonts on it?

*I understand tooling costs ($100K for molds) and such but still more than I'm willing to spend.

[dionmunk]

There is a font called Bryant Regular that is very similar to Gorton Modified.


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[ErgoMacros]

You can try going here: https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
with an image of the keys/font. (One line at a time)
Verb Regular and Langton Bold look fairly close to me. Although neither have slashed-zeros,
Langton has "Latin Capital Letter O with Stroke Unicode: U+00D8 (Ø)" that could service.

Cheers!

[Pwner]

Gotham Rounded is a pretty decent alternative.

[ac2ev]

Thanks I'll look at those. Searching for Gorton I came across a vintage aircraft forum and found clues to a mil-spec font that was close and I was able to find a copy of that font so I'll have to see which one is closest.

[dionmunk]

Thanks I'll look at those. Searching for Gorton I came across a vintage aircraft forum and found clues to a mil-spec font that was close and I was able to find a copy of that font so I'll have to see which one is closest.

What's the mil-spec font called? I'd be interested to see it.


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[ac2ev]

milspec33558
I found it here: http://www.fonts2u.net/download-milspec33558-zip126902.htm

[ac2ev]

There is a font called Bryant Regular that is very similar to Gorton Modified.


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Thank you. I think I'm going to go with this. The mil-spec font is probably going to be "too thick" plus I'm having to layout characters individually since it doesn't support inter-character spacing or kerning. But we'll see how it looks when it's done.

[dionmunk]

There is a font called Bryant Regular that is very similar to Gorton Modified.


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Thank you. I think I'm going to go with this. The mil-spec font is probably going to be "too thick" plus I'm having to layout characters individually since it doesn't support inter-character spacing or kerning. But we'll see how it looks when it's done.

I just came across Bryant Pro. If you can get your hands on that font it has even more extra characters and the like.


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[ac2ev]

I think I found it here:

https://fontstand.com/fonts/bryant-pro
This site will let me try it out for an hour or rent it. Not sure if that will work.

Other sites wanted $50 or more to purchase it. Great if you're company and can afford to buy a font for one-time use.

[Wingklip]

http://kinobrand.com/nixin-typeface-design/

These fonts look sick on 70's and 80's keyboards