Leaf & Spine

Typeface · Sans-serif

Letter Gothic

Letter Gothic is a monospaced sans-serif typeface.

About Letter Gothic

Letter Gothic is a monospaced sans-serif typeface. It was created between 1956 and 1962 by Roger Roberson for IBM in their Lexington, Kentucky, plant, and was inspired by the original drawings for Optima. It was initially intended to be used in IBM's Selectric typewriters. It is readable and is recommended for technical documentation and for sheets including columnar data. Gayaneh Bagdasaryan designed a proportional font called New Letter Gothic, based on Letter Gothic, for ParaType. Letter Gothic was included in Windows 95. It was replaced by Andalé Mono in Windows 98 and in 2001, Windows XP replaced it with Lucida Console.

From the Wikipedia article “Letter Gothic”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Using Letter Gothic in a book

Sans-serif faces work well for headings, captions, children's books and modern nonfiction. For long-form body text in print, most designers still prefer a serif.

Commercial typefaces require a licence that covers embedding in PDFs and ebooks; check the foundry's licence before you publish.

Sources & data

More sans-serif typefaces

Arial 1982 Comic Sans MS 1994 Gill Sans 1928 Univers 1957 Open Sans 2010 Consolas 2006 Franklin Gothic 1902 Source Sans 2012

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