Is there a good
visual reference for the serif styles of the Font Family Classification Class and Subclass?
In particular, I am trying to classify Charis SIL / Bitstream Charter and I can't determine the Subclass from the resources I can locate. However ... a general visual reference for all the classes and subclasses of the Font Family Classification would be great ...
Resources such as
https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/type-classifications are good for the Class, but not the SubClass.
Comments
Microsoft offers text descriptions (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/ibmfc), but nothing visual.
Your case is in between: where the IBM classification spec calls for “Century” the book shows Century Oldstyle, which is … different.
Might there be a better source? ... one that shows samples of the actual fonts cited by Microsoft? Collecting them myself would be a bit of a project ...
Also, Press Roman is an old IBM typewriter font, from the 1960s. It superficially looks a lot like Times, but with widths adapted to IBM’s Selectric Composer system (notably the M and W are much narrower, numerals a bit narrower across the board). I don’t have a high-res scan of it, unfortunately.
It’s not a great scan, but here’s a sample of Press Roman from a circa 1970 specimen.
Classification is always a thorny (but interesting!) topic. Tell us more about what you’re working on and maybe we can provide useful resources. Any reason why you’re limited to the IBM system?
Might there be a reason not to set this field?