Specimen
Moon Uniform
A free typeface for Moon type, the raised alphabet that blind people read with a fingertip. You type English; the font sets it in Moon, with the short forms that Moon books have always used.
This is still a pre-release. The fonts will be published here once a Moon reader has tested them on paper.
Version 0.7 Light, Regular, Bold, and Dotty 1394 code points OFL-1.1
What Moon is
Moon type: a raised alphabet for people who lose their sight later in life
William Moon published it in 1845. He had gone blind himself, and he found braille hard to learn. So he built an alphabet out of straight lines and curves, large enough and simple enough to follow with one finger. Nine of its letters are Roman letters kept as they are. The rest are new shapes, and many are the same shape turned around.
People still read it today, mostly people who lost their sight as adults. Moon books are printed by pressing the shapes into thick paper. There is no ink on the page: the letter is the raised line itself.
Short forms
Moon books shorten common words and endings, as braille does. This font applies those rules for you.
Sources
Every sign in the font points to a document that shows it. Where no document exists, the font says the sign is a guess. How we know.
Free to use
Open licence. You can use it, study it, change it and pass it on, under a different name if you change it.
The family
Three weights, and a fourth that is made of dots
The shapes do not change between the weights. Only the thickness of the line changes, because the line is what the finger follows. Bold is the one to emboss.
Moon Uniform Dotty turns the same shapes into a 5 × 5 pattern of dots, which is how a braille machine prints Moon. The alphabet page has the whole repertoire, and the type tester sets your own words in it.
Where to go
Four ways into this
Try it
Type a sentence and watch it become Moon. Change how much it shortens, and see what your own browser makes of it.
The alphabet
Every sign the font draws: letters, numbers, punctuation, the short forms, the weights, and the other languages Moon was carried into.
What is Moon type?
Who William Moon was, why the letters look like that, how the books were printed, and who reads Moon now.
Research
How this project knows what it knows, which signs are still guesses, and the documents we are still looking for.
Get it
Install it, or use it on a web page
There is no public download yet. The shapes and the rules are settled, but nobody has read the font by touch, and that test comes first. When a release is published, the files will be OTF for desktop programs, hinted TTF for screens, and WOFF2 for the web.
Until then you can build the fonts yourself from the
repository with make build.
However you get it, mark your text as English. That is the language the short forms are set for; unmarked text keeps every letter.
@font-face {
font-family: "Moon Uniform";
src: url("MoonUniform-Regular.woff2") format("woff2"),
url("MoonUniform-Regular.otf") format("opentype");
font-weight: 400;
}
/* Grade 2 is what you get by default. Shorten less with these: */
.grade-1 { font-feature-settings: "calt" 0, "clig" 0; }
.full { font-feature-settings: "calt" 0, "clig" 0, "liga" 0; }<p class="moon" lang="en">the thing that counts</p>Browsers do not all apply these rules in the same way, and some do not tell the font what language the text is in. If a platform matters to you, test it there. The browser check does exactly that, and it is the reason the specimens on this site are drawings rather than live text.
Specifications
- Author
- Marton Paulo
- Author site
- martonpaulo.com
- Version
- 0.7
- Status
- Pre-release. The shapes and the rules are settled; the tactile evaluation is not.
- Styles
- Light, Regular, Bold, and Moon Uniform Dotty
- Formats
- OTF, hinted TTF, WOFF2
- OpenType features
- ccmp, locl, liga, clig, calt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06
- Scripts
- Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Arabic
- Languages
- Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese
- Character set
- 1394 code points, 265 glyphs
- Licence
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
- Sample text
- the thing that counts
- Repository
- github.com/martonpaulo/moon-uniform
- Issues
- github.com/martonpaulo/moon-uniform/issues
- Contact
- [email protected]