Help, please: Seeking antique font software

[Gingerella]

Hello there engraving community...I have been reading through your wonderful forum, in a search to know if there are any antique fonts available on software.

I have an antique sterling locket and I want to have a monogram put on it, but I'm interested mainly in the antique style monograms of the Victorian, Edwardian and possibly Deco eras. I have found a series of books with CDs, by Dover Publishing, that could possibly help me, but when I stumbled onto your site I thought this is the place to really find out what software exists for this. FYI, I plan on having this hand engraved but I would like to do my own design, if possible. Below are a few examples of the styles I am interested in replicating in a monogram.

Thanking you in advance for any information or knowledge you are able to share with me.

 

[Keith]

I dont know of any software. Most of these have to be hand drawn.
GRS tools sells a book Crocker Monograms that has many alphabets drawn out letter by letter in many different fonts.
Good Luck with the project.


http://www.grstools.com/books/letters-and-monograms/022-821.html

 

[Tim Wells]

Google the name Bergling or Bergling Art Monograms and see what comes up. Bergling wrote several books on lettering, mongrams and the like and are the best I have seen. To date, I know of no software to create that beautiful old style lettering.

I think your best bet if you want to design the thing yourself is to get hold of these books, borrow them or see if a library has them and study the letter styles to learn the style so that what you come up with will look similar to get the feel, but not necessarily verbatim. These were originally created from imagination put to paper.

If that seems too much to do then I'd find an engraver here maybe that has done a lot of this type work with photos and let them design it after you tell them what you want. They can then draw a few up and email them for your approval. Hope this helps.

By the way, GRS sells all the Bergling books so you could just search the titles there, and for what they are and what they contain the prices are reasonable.

 

[diandwill]

I was looking for Uncial, for my celtic engraving and came across this link:

http://www.fontspace.com/

They have plenty of freeware and shareware fonts. Don't know if they have yours, but its a freee registration so look.

I got several that will be usable for engraving. The self extract and install themselves into Word and/or Publisher where I do a lot of layout.

Will

 

[DakotaDocMartin]

You can buy several types of monogram fonts here:

http://www.haroldsfonts.com/frontpage.html

 

[Gingerella]

Thank you for all your prompt replies, I really do appreciate your guidance on what books might be useful for this project.

I'm looking at the links some of you provided and will see what those are about. I found a series of books on Amazon and some come with CD-Roms of fonts but I'm not sure how usable they are. It's the Dover series, link below, anyone have any experience with those before I buy them?


Also, I was hunting around last night on this site and found one monogram quite similar to what I had in mind, though perhaps a bit more ornate. It was posted by Leroytwohawks:

http://igraver.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6249&highlight=antique+monogram

I cannot find any photos of his finished product though. In the drawing there is quite a lot of shading and detail and the other photo appears to be his outline, which looks very good...I wonder if he finished shading that monogram...?

 

[diandwill]

My experience with the Dover books, w CD is that the books have nice pictures, and the images on the CD are a lower DPI, and not usable for me. It meant that I had to scan the image and then transfer, just an extra step to be sure, but an extra step. I don't use the CD's at all.

 

[leroytwohawks]

Also, I was hunting around last night on this site and found one monogram quite similar to what I had in mind, though perhaps a bit more ornate. It was posted by Leroytwohawks:

http://igraver.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6249&highlight=antique+monogram

I cannot find any photos of his finished product though. In the drawing there is quite a lot of shading and detail and the other photo appears to be his outline, which looks very good...I wonder if he finished shading that monogram...?

To let you know I did not do anything else to it, it was more of a practice and a monogram that came out of a book, so not one I designed so sorry I don't have a font for it. I wish I did.

Kevin

 

[DKanger]

Might I suggest that you also expand your search to books on calligraphy. I know I have one around here somewhere that includes monogram design, but I can't locate it at the moment.

 

[leroytwohawks]

OK I just sent you a link to download several monogram books that I posted a while back up here. And encase anyone else missed them last time here they are again.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/t3rgzm

Kevin

 

[Tim Wells]

My experience with the Dover books, w CD is that the books have nice pictures, and the images on the CD are a lower DPI, and not usable for me. It meant that I had to scan the image and then transfer, just an extra step to be sure, but an extra step. I don't use the CD's at all.

The CD that accompanies the book has all the images in the book in three different file extensions which are .jpg, .bmp, and .tiff. This way you have choices so if you want to enlarge a monogram for example, one format will allow this with a lot less distortion or pixelation (is that a word? if it ain't it ought to be)than another like a jpeg which is compressed and won't "swell up" much without getting fuzzy.

I have used a few out of these books, enlarged and transferred as crisp as can be. Look on your CD and see if it has three different file types in seperate folders.

 

[Gingerella]

Thank you all who replied to this thread. I'm going to purchase some books online and see what I can come up with. I'll update this thread when I get closer to finalizing anything but in the meantime, it seems like there could be more info on antique style monograms so please feel free to add any information to this thread and I'll check it often. Thank you!