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I am looking for a realistic typewriter font - Free if possible!

i know courier is similar to typewriting font, but i want one that has more of the genuine imperfections of the actual typewritten output.

you know the e or some other letters not quite printing clearly

Can anyone help with this?

Fill your boots: http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Here's a few freebies:

http://www.themeworld.com/cgi-bin/preview.pl/fonts/another_.0.zip

http://www.themeworld.com/cgi-bin/preview.pl/fonts/moms_typ.0.zip - very "dirty", but sometimes useful.

http://desktoppub.about.com/library/fonts/bl_fab010801.htm - free for private use

http://www.dafont.com/alpha.php?lettre=t&page=42 - There's a few examples on this page, and the next.

Hope those help.

thank you to both of you just what i needed

I believe American Typewriter is free on Macs, it looks good and it's not overused like Courier is

If you want a genuine 'golfball' or 'hammer' typewriter typeface, look for a monospaced one. That basically means every letter is the same WIDTH. Even the 'i' and the full stop '.'

Most modern typewriter faces are automatically kerned so the letters take their own exclusion zone, and they look wrong as a typewriter face.

For instance:

Code: Select all

In this 'code' typeface, all characters occupy an equal block of space, which is measured by the width of the largest letter, M, even the full stops and punctuation ! - ( ) ........ Hence the term 'em space'.
That's because old typewriters would only advance the paper by an equal gap each time, they weren't intelligently programmed to be able to tell that an 'i' or lowercase L was thinner, and therefore only needed a little exclusion... all characters were treated as an 'M' in width, which is why the typewriter faces were styled to make each character fill the M gap as much as possible.

Wheras, notice in this normal typeface, each letter is a different width.

American Typewriter is definately one of the best.

Found a few useful ones now, didnt realise there was such a wealth of great fonts out there for free

It should also be mentioned that you can distress any font yourself - it doesn't have to be the actual font.

For me, I would use American Typewriter and distress it myself in photoshop - gives you more control, and doesn't look as deliberate as some of the fonts available on the net.