Revision as of 08:06, 5 April 2010

Exalted Fonts

Part of Exalted's visual style stems from the fonts White Wolf uses. This page aims to list these fonts so that others who want to might match this style.

A note on font names

The copyright law that surrounds fonts, particularly in the United states, is a little unusual. Digital font technology has blurred this law even more. For now, the design of a font is not protected intellectual property in the U.S., though this may be changing. What this means for font designers who spend huge amounts of time designing quality typefaces is that they have little recourse when some fly-by-night font foundry copies their fonts, changes the name (and maybe a couple of bytes) and releases it as their own work.

What this means for end users is that for every decent font out there, there are dozens of cloned knock-offs, all with different names. Most of the knockoff shops use inferior software to create font bundles, so often these knockoffs work great on one platform but not on others, or have much different characteristics than the originals at small (or very large) sizes. For example, some fonts work great on screen and printer, but show unexplained gremlins or different metrics when embedded in a PDF.

For the purposes of this page, the font name given will be the one used by White Wolf's PDF files. These names tend to be the ones used by Adobe and AGFA. If other knockoff names are known, these will be listed as well.

Fonts

http://rpg.divnull.com/exalted/fonts/albertus.png

Use: Chapter titles
Knockoff Names: Albertus MT Std, Flareserif, Adelon, Alburt
Sources: MyFonts.com Fonts.com

This font is always used in all capital letters (as shown in the image).

http://rpg.divnull.com/exalted/fonts/missive.png

Use: Section headings, some fiction sections
Knockoff Names: Pterra-dactl, Pterra
Sources: MyFonts.com Fonts.com

For section headings, this font is used in small caps (as shown in graphic). When used for fiction, it uses standard case.

http://rpg.divnull.com/exalted/fonts/goudy.png

Use: Body text
Knockoff Names: Many variants of "Goudy". Adobe's version is Goudy Old Style.
Sources: MyFonts.com Fonts.com

Goudy is a little unusual in that its bold variant contains glyphs with different shapes than their plain counterparts. For example, observe a plain capital W and compare it to one that is bolded. As a result, there tends to be a lot of variation between various versions of Goudy. Goudy also looks a lot like a font called Garamound (so much so it was mistakenly used instead of Goudy in ForgottenSuns), but they do have subtle differences. Conversely, there are a number of fonts with "Goudy" in the name that bear no resemblance to the primary Goudy font.

Comments

Missive is also used for the text on the Charm trees in (at least) the core rulebook. Pterra isn't quite the same as Missive (see, for instance, the lower case G) but makes a reasonable substitute, I guess. It is one of the fonts used in the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks, though. Sixten

What sometimes happens is that a font is used for something, then someone else decides to build a font based on seeing that something, without tracking down the original font. In the case of Missive, I think it was used for the Blair Witch Project, and the creator of Pterra based it on the marquee. - Wordman

You'll notice through careful examination that even commercial Missive is not quite the font in the books; it appears to have been altered a bit. - willows

Can you cite some specific examples? That's the font name in the PDF versions of the core and Cult of the Illuminated, and I'd compared pretty closely when this came up in a thread on RPGnet. But they may not be using the T-26 version of Missive that I linked to. Sixten