FF Trixie

FF Trixie is full of superlatives. Its capital “X” is likely the most-famous letter in the entire FontFont library – it was used in the X-files logo, titles and credits. Because of this, FF Trixie is possibly the most-used typewriter-style font in the world. In the beginning however, the typeface was considered kind of a joke. The typical response to the design in the early 1990s went like this: “Why make a font that makes expensive desktop publishing supercomputers look like old typewriters?” History gives the definitive answer. Fonts like FF Trixie are designed and used because they’re fun and look cool. The design requires is a highly detailed typeface that captures the roughness and irregularities of old typewriter output. It’s actually just a recreation of one typewriter in particular. All the characters from this typewriter kept their faults intact during the typeface’s development. Its characters vary in height, rotation and distance to the baseline, just as they did when typewritten on the original machine. The current FF Trixie offers a number of improvements over the original PostScript release from 1991. For example, larger character sets and OpenType allow more choice in roughness and texture of its output. For use at larger sizes, the FF Trixie Rough shows greater detail. This ensures that letters continue to look rough and interesting, rather than turn into sharp straight-sided polygons. The FF Trixie HD series sets a new standard for detail, and takes full advantage of its OpenType technology. For use in typography where resolution matters, FF Trixie HD brings seven alternates per character, each glyph with its own variation of weight and roughness. OpenType features randomize the alternates on the line to simulate the typewritten page in a way never before seen in digital typography. The effect of the ink and the ribbon is visible. The characters appear in hyper-realistic resolution both on screen and in print. These details come at a price, however: the largest HD weight, FF Trixie HD Pro Heavy, has over 6.7 million points. All FF Trixie OpenType weights combined contain over 1 million contours, and 14.5 million points, creating quite a heavy processing job for layout engines and rasterizers.