Looking for John-Paul Knox/Perrin OT/Marquet OT

konrad ritter

Dear experts,

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to get in touch with M. John-Paul Knox, creator of Perrin OT:
 
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-43897.html

I'm really infatuated with that face, which I've been staring at for years. I just recently learned, from Mr Devroye's database, that it's been digitized. But, I can't find any traces of it anywhere. The old Typophile website seems to be gone for good, and that was my last hope. Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Marc Oxborrow

For what it's worth, you can read the long thread about the font in this archived version of Typophile. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20111230234505/http://typophile.com/node/7596

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Long live the Wayback Machine!

One weird thing about Typophile though is that at some point any accented character in old posts would completely dump the rest of the post, as you can see in my reply there: "Ren" was "René", and there was a lot more after that!

George Thomas

@konrad ritter -- This is likely him: j.knox@uwinnipeg.ca

konrad ritter

Wonderful -- thank you all for your kind help and advice. 
And yes, long live the Wayback Machine. Much of the internet is a landfill these days where everyone recopies the present to no purpose. That WM archive alone keeps something worth preserving. 

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

BTW, I just realized that "nepenthe" in that Typophile thread is none other than JP Knox! And I had an email exchange with him in early 2009... with a different email address than the one George posted. What I'll do is email JP with the address I have and see if it still works.

konrad ritter

Thank you much. I had a hunch it may be him. I loved the story of how he came to like that face by reading the same books I did, when I discovered it. Small world. 

J.P. Knox

Hi. Thanks for getting in touch with me, @konrad ritter, and for letting me know about this forum. I am going to look into distributing these fonts on one of the online shops, but in the mean time people can contact me at the email on my account here.

Long time no see, @Hrant H. Papazian! Thanks to you, people keep finding me and asking about Marquet. Most notably it was recently used for a special edition of The Raven sold by ArtBook dot com. Thanks to that project, I got access to some very high quality scans of letterpressed Beaudoire fonts, and I was thereby able to improve the titling and italic, and also add some swashes.

konrad ritter

I just bought a copy of the new Marquet OT, and it is fantastic. Quite reasonably priced, as well. It's my new favorite!

J.P. Knox

Thanks, @konrad ritter . Glad you're enjoying it!

Claudio Piccinini

J.P. Knox said:

Hi. Thanks for getting in touch with me, @konrad ritter, and for letting me know about this forum. I am going to look into distributing these fonts on one of the online shops, but in the mean time people can contact me at the email on my account here.

Long time no see, @Hrant H. Papazian! Thanks to you, people keep finding me and asking about Marquet. Most notably it was recently used for a special edition of The Raven sold by ArtBook dot com. Thanks to that project, I got access to some very high quality scans of letterpressed Beaudoire fonts, and I was thereby able to improve the titling and italic, and also add some swashes.

That is great, let us know when it will be licensed, either if you decide to do so yourself or through a foundry.

Claudio Piccinini

P.S. While I am at it, can I ask which was your rationale about the inclusion of certain Math operators? (screen shot from your old PDF file) – I don’t think I’ll include many but I wondered why you favored these (beyond the basic ones, I mean).

J.P. Knox

Hi Claudio,

For the time being, they can actually be licensed directly from me (am I allowed to say that here?). You can contact me at the email in my profile about it.

I added the ones I did based on what I needed for university papers at the time, so they were mostly related to symbolic logic. I later added Greek, some IPA characters, and extended accents as needed for various papers. Marquet was effectively what I used instead of TNR, the required typeface at the time.

If you would need some different mathematical symbols, I can certainly add them for you.

konrad ritter

In my line of work, I need to rely a lot on the group of symbols and operators that J.P. included with his Regular style, so I can attest that they're very useful. 

Claudio Piccinini

J.P. Knox said:

Hi Claudio,

For the time being, they can actually be licensed directly from me (am I allowed to say that here?). You can contact me at the email in my profile about it.

I added the ones I did based on what I needed for university papers at the time, so they were mostly related to symbolic logic. I later added Greek, some IPA characters, and extended accents as needed for various papers. Marquet was effectively what I used instead of TNR, the required typeface at the time.

If you would need some different mathematical symbols, I can certainly add them for you.

Thanks, I was mostly asking because if you decide to set up a foundry page or the like, I’d like to know.

As for the Math coverage, I asked because I have to decide myself, just in case, which are the more essential ones to include, according to application field. Is there a basic set for symbolic logic? I understand De Vinne is not a text face, but while I am at it, I could draw them to include in De Vinne Text and other text faces that I will do.
Here’s the ones I designed so far, but without much rationale as I do not know logic or, for that matter, mathematical and scientific fields of application.
P.S. The black squares, I added them for potential decorative purposes, trying to systematize the dimensions and I see these are considered Math operators, but I haven’t investigated them so far.

konrad ritter

That's a good beginning. Based on the kind of work people do in my field, I'd recommend adding a few more. 

Symbols for quantifiers, existential and universal. 


The symbols for set inclusion and intersection:

 
A few more symbols, for gradient, perpendicular, congruent, and set membership:



Two kinds of Greek deltas, one for partial derivatives, another for virtual work (the 'variational' delta):

Three more logic operators, for empty set, logical equivalence, and explicit definition:



However, I must say that this is a minimal set of symbols, as it were. It would be enough for people in the humanities and most social sciences; but definitely not enough for anyone who works in math or physics. Those guys need a ton of symbols. 

Claudio Piccinini

konrad ritter said:

That's a good beginning. Based on the kind of work people do in my field, I'd recommend adding a few more. 

Symbols for quantifiers, existential and universal. 


The symbols for set inclusion and intersection:

 
A few more symbols, for gradient, perpendicular, congruent, and set membership:



Two kinds of Greek deltas, one for partial derivatives, another for virtual work (the 'variational' delta):

Three more logic operators, for empty set, logical equivalence, and explicit definition:



However, I must say that this is a minimal set of symbols, as it were. It would be enough for people in the humanities and most social sciences; but definitely not enough for anyone who works in math or physics. Those guys need a ton of symbols. 

Thank you!
Of course, if one decides to offer coverage for logic or math and/or physics in an extended way, I would ask more in detail. It was to give some kind of basic coverage for logic. These are for logic? Also the deltas?
But I don’t want to go off-topic, maybe the last posts would be better in a thread of its own.

konrad ritter

No, the deltas are for elementary math and physics. 

For logic, you'd only need a few symbols: two quantifiers, union, intersection, set membership, arrows (one way, the other way, and both ways) the "Polish negation" operator, and the three-dot symbol (see below) that indicates the conclusion of an argument. And brackets/parentheses: round, square, and accolades. That's all for most logic text setting. There's a more exotic branch, called modal logic, that requires two more symbols: the empty square and empty rhombus/lozenge symbol. I think that covers it all. 

Florian Pircher

I would encourage you to also add the ↔ and ↕ arrows. They should be easy to add since you already have ← → ↑ ↓ and I find myself using double-arrows surprisingly often while surprisingly few fonts have double-arrows.

Claudio Piccinini

Florian Pircher said:

I would encourage you to also add the ↔ and ↕ arrows. They should be easy to add since you already have ← → ↑ ↓ and I find myself using double-arrows surprisingly often while surprisingly few fonts have double-arrows.

Thanks! Definitely this topic deserves a thread of its own, if there aren’t already.

Claudio Piccinini

@konrad ritter, @J.P. Knox, have you seen "Mercure" by Charles Mazé?
https://www.abyme.net/catalogue/mercure/

konrad ritter

Yes, I have, and I've printed out the specimen. I still think J.P.'s revival is better. It reads very smoothly, and has a better x-height, it seems to me. It's got a calming presence on the page. 'Mercure' Roman seems to me a bit too spindly, and there's something about ti that makes it less transparent than 'Marquet.' The Italic is very good, though.  

Plus, 'Marquet' is more affordable. :-) 

BTW, Claudio, I know you're working on a revival. If I may humbly suggest, I hope your text version will avoid the chopped terminals of some of the old De Vinnes (DJR kept that annoying bit in his Roslindale Text, and I don't like it at all). It's distracting and not beautiful. Rafaello was much better, I think. 

J.P. Knox

That Mercure seems to be a very nice interpretation of the Perrin typefaces on which Beaudoire's typeface were based. I really like what's been done there!

Thanks for the kind words, @konrad ritter! I'm just doing some housekeeping on my fonts before I make them more widely available and will be looking at the logical operators. I'll check to see which of the ones you mentioned above are missing, and please let me know if you find any of the existing ones don't set well, and I'll work on updating them.

konrad ritter

I don't mean to imply that Mercure is not good -- far from it. On its own, it's excellent, to be sure; just not as good as the competition. I may be too demanding, which I admit. 

konrad ritter

BTW, J.P., if I may suggest something: I see you offer a few alternate glyphs, which is good. It may be useful to consider adding another alternate: a lowercase /r/ where the shoulder and the bulbous terminal are the same height as the upper serif. 

J.P. Knox

That awkward 'r' is one of my favorite quirks of the original font, but I can make a more normal one as an alternate.

konrad ritter

I love it too -- it's very endearing. But maybe sometimes, for long chunks of text, a more subdued one would pass unnoticed. It would be purely optional, of course. 

Claudio Piccinini

konrad ritter said:

Yes, I have, and I've printed out the specimen. I still think J.P.'s revival is better. It reads very smoothly, and has a better x-height, it seems to me. It's got a calming presence on the page. 'Mercure' Roman seems to me a bit too spindly, and there's something about ti that makes it less transparent than 'Marquet.' The Italic is very good, though.  

Plus, 'Marquet' is more affordable. :-) 

BTW, Claudio, I know you're working on a revival. If I may humbly suggest, I hope your text version will avoid the chopped terminals of some of the old De Vinnes (DJR kept that annoying bit in his Roslindale Text, and I don't like it at all). It's distracting and not beautiful. Rafaello was much better, I think. 

It did not even occur to me to compare J.P.’s typeface to that Mercure. What I liked it’s that Mazé framed his design/revival within the historical occurrency of the exposed writings' first transcriptions, and to the practice in general.

I haven’t printed neither, but I think I see what you mean, Mercure seems a bit "overworked". And of course, these licensing prices are too high (especially considered the intent of "vulgarization" and historical awareness).

My revival is De Vinne, which is not a text typeface, and the only reason which prompted me to do it was to be extremely faithful to the original. I have also started the rare text version, for which it’s a bit difficult to find source material, but so far it’s coming together very nicely. I’ll show it when it’s in a more advanced stage.
So no risk about "reinterpretation", although I am not sure I get what you mean about Roslindale (aside being very "homogenized").