Typography dives

Every few months one of my favourite type foundries or digital typography distributors (large or indie) will have a sale. This makes type nerds like me very happy.

Many of the high quality, expensive typefaces I have in my collection I bought on sale. So whenever there’s a chance for me to grow my collection without spending too much, I always take a good look to see what’s on offer.

Even if I don’t end up buying anything during these sales (which is what usually happens) I do end up taking a dive – sometimes a deep dive – back into the world of typography.

Screenshot of an email that reads, “Spring sale is on! Foundry-wide sales up to 75% off. March 20-26. Spring is here and our sale is blooming! Our foundry-wide sales, with 50 top foundries participating is on till tomorrow only. We’re featuring 10 top foundries every day. Let’s get straight to it! Happy shopping!”. The email is signed “ILT” (which stands for I Love Typography).

Diving into Times New Roman, of all things

Last week, for example, I ended up downloading and trying out a bunch of indie typefaces – some free, some pay-what-you-like.

One of the typefaces I came across was PT Astra Serif, which is a drop-in replacement for Times New Roman that’s been released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).

Digital poster with “PT Astra Serif” written in big text in the centre. A line below this reads, “Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic” in regular, italic, bold, and bold italic font.

Why on earth did someone create an OFL version of Times New Roman? Especially when there are a bunch of open-license alternatives already available, like:

Well, it turns out PT Astra Serif was created for Astra Linux. That’s a secure version of the Linux operating system that the Russian Federation has been developing and deploying over several years in order to replace Microsoft Windows. And so the creation of this OS-specific typeface that will be compatible with what the rest of the world uses makes sense.

Now I don’t use Times New Roman anymore. And if I had to write a formal document that required this specific style of typeface, I already have a couple of typefaces that I would use instead.

But since PT Astra Serif was created by Paratype, a type foundry I quite like, I wondered: just how does PT Astra Serif compare to Times New Roman and my current alternatives? And thus began a fun, semi-deep dive into these Times New Roman alternatives that I will document in my next post.

So yay for typographic nerdiness, type sales, and the resulting deep dives into things that will never affect my day-to-day but are fun to explore nonetheless :)