A Type Tool For You

Carl Shank • February 21, 2023

A Type Tool and An Offer

I remember the "good old days" of type and typesetting and layout tools mailed to you by different companies. I still have many of those type spec tools in my layout drawer. I have constructed a Type Tool for your use and enjoyment. It has been a labor of love, constructing the inch ruler, centimeter ruler and pica & point rulers. These have been done from hand by using standard measuring tools. I also put on a fractional equivalency chart, a useful dingbats reference, and an inside pull slider giving some samples of popular font choices and amazing ampersands.


I am including the construction method of this Tool below for your use and fun. You will need a program that can produce an 11 x 8.5 image and download the PDF from here. I am also offering through our Store the Type Tool and a thumb drive of all the blogs I have posted up to this date. They are catalogued using Adobe InDesign's program, employing the Minion Pro font and Formata Bold as well. Quite a bit of work went into these instruments of typography and graphic design tools, so I hope you are able to order and use them freely. They are copyrighted, so please do not remake them as your own.


Most of all, enjoy!

Successful Layout & Design

By Carl Shank December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
By Carl Shank December 22, 2025
CARE Typography is pleased to announce a new typeface — NabelDado — in standard black-and-white font formulation as well as colored SVG formats. Please see samples below. Order from cshanktype@gmail.com. Enjoy!
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