Półtawski Nowy
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MISS WHITE’S STORY
The story, as Miss White told it, was not unusual in that part of the city, but to John Dean there was every element of newness in it.
He listened without interruption as the story unfolded itself.
Mrs. Marsh, Ted’s mother, had had a hard time of it. Bill Marsh had married her eighteen years ago. Bill was a good mechanic, but after about six years of happiness things began to go wrong. He lost his position and at that time work was not easy to get. Day after day he had searched for something to do. Discouraged, he had taken to drink. Then there was a day when Bill did not return. In all these years Mrs. Marsh had never heard of him. She felt he was dead, yet even that she did not know.
It was a hard struggle afterward. Sewing and washing, early and late, and many a day she went hungry, so that the two children could eat. The mother often spoke of how Ted, when eight years old, had gone out one afternoon and had not returned until seven o’clock. Without a word he had put fifteen cents on the table and then had turned to eat. He showed by the way he ate how hungry he was. After the meal was over, he explained how he had made up his mind to support the family, and so he had bought some papers; the fifteen cents was profit. His capital, also some extra pennies, was intact, so that he could buy more papers.
Półtawski Nowy is a digitisation project the Antykwa Półtawskiego typeface. A key aspect of the design of the digital version of the typeface from 1928 was the approach to the issue of developing the shape of characters from sources. Historical research was carried out in parallel with the preparation of the computer version, which allowed us to learn about the unique story of this most recognizable Polish font design. The Półtawski Nowy type family is intended for typesetting in sizes from 10 to 18 pt. It includes 6 instances (3 upright and 3 italic weights) and is available for download under an open font license. The project is implemented thanks to the support of the Digital Culture 2020 program of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
In the Półtawski Nowy digitisation, the source of the study were scans of a type specimen book from the Idźkowski i S-ka foundry, a set of drawings, punch patterns and punches made by Monotype in Salfords, Great Britain in 1934-1955. They were made available to us by the Type Archive London. Thanks to the standardization of characters and the balancing of the typographic rhythm, in the digital version, the typeface retains its ornamental character, while working well in smaller text sizes. The basic character set available in the sources has been extended with further variants of diacritics, small caps, subscript and superscript, variants of numbers (tabular, proportional, nautical) and a set of OpenType features.