One geometry.
PORTSMOUTH / RELEASE 1.0 / FIVE FONTS ENTERED
A family made between fonts.
No source was chosen as the master. Portsmouth was built by giving corresponding structures equal influence, then making the disagreements explicit.
- Sources
- 5
- Encoded characters
- 349
- Family faces
- 5 + Mono
- Structural failures
- 0 at release audit
LIVE TYPE
Say something of your own.
Checking the face…
Multiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time.
THE FAMILY
Same inheritance. Different weather.
Less radius.
A 13° wind.
More radius.
Both at once.
for(i=0; i<10; i++)
PORTSMOUTH
Multiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time
PORTSMOUTH RAPIDS
Multiple Occupant Room, Hotel, End of Time
Rapids preserves the outlines and removes 68 units from every advance. The rhythm is a family-wide metric decision—no kerning exceptions, no contextual tricks.
HOW FIVE FONTS BECAME ONE
Equal weight had to mean equal influence.
- 01Five sourcesAnnotation Mono, Comic Shanns Mono, Syne Mono, Bedstead, Routed Gothic.
- 02Normalize landmarksOne em, baseline, x-height, cap height, ascender and descender—without erasing horizontal character.
- 03Reject the scalar fieldAveraged filled distance fields preserved weight numerically while suppressing Bedstead’s construction.
- 04Transport contoursTopology-aware ordered correspondence on 10,240 points per source contour.
- 05Take the barycenterAt each correspondence, the output is the arithmetic mean. No source outline becomes the base.
- 06Fit Makima curvesCyclic arc-length masters, structural events and bounded quadratic conversion replace millions of dense samples.
- 07Derive the familyWind-field Italic, topology-constrained Eikonal Bold, Light, and content-aware Mono.
- 08Audit what renderedSpacing, punctuation, language coverage, character identity and cross-face topology.
The median skeleton attracts correspondence. It never supplies the filled letter.
SELECTED DISAGREEMENTS
The exceptions are part of the typeface.
m
The first witness
Filled-field averaging made Bedstead’s peaked second shoulder disappear into the rounded majority. Ordered contour transport retained the shoulder sequence and equal quarter-weight source influence.
a
Choose the construction
The sources did not agree on what an a was. The accepted one-storey body is an equal-third fusion of Comic Shanns, Syne Mono and Routed Gothic; its accent family was rebased on that decision.
Q
Tail meets counter
Transporting the tail and counter independently cut an optical notch. Portsmouth treats the intrusion as a coupled boundary event, not a blemish to smooth afterward.
0
One ring, two counters
Two sources slash zero; one does not. Three outer rings and the shared counter were fused equally, then the already-fused Portsmouth solidus was shortened inside the ring.
0 1 i I l |
Confusable, not interchangeable
The zero is slashed. The one has a flag and foot. Capital I has bilateral bars; lowercase l does not. Lowercase i keeps its detached tittle. The release audit checks structure as well as appearance.
Navigation belongs to a system
Parent Eikonal fields establish the arrows’ scale, topology and optical center. A straight-skeleton construction resolves incompatible curved, pixel and stencil joins; renderer-owned icons stay out of the font.
“Wait—what?”;
Punctuation is measured rhythm
The semicolon’s lower component was centered between comma and colon. The hyphen rose to the plus crossbar. Curly quotes use the uncased equal-third route. The thought break is a directly encoded thinking cloud.
RENDERED TESTS
The files had to survive outside the idea.
THE FIVE SOURCES
Attribution remains attached.
Annotation MonoOFL 1.1 · lowercase + uppercase routes
Comic Shanns MonoMIT · lowercase + uppercase routes
Syne MonoOFL 1.1 · uppercase route
BedsteadPublic domain · lowercase route
Routed GothicOFL 1.1 · lowercase + uppercase routes
Portsmouth is a personal and artistic synthesis, not an original or endorsed edition of any source face. Each download contains the full project record, source identities and design decisions.
TAKE THE TYPE