| Date: 1987 Designer:
Matthew Carter Foundry:
Bitstream / ITC Location:
Massachussetts, USA Current equivalent:
Charter BT Pro
See also:
BT Transitional 801, ITC Charter
Technologies:
Postscript
Opentype
| | Famous for:
The first font designed by Matthew Carter for Bitstream. Applications: Book Publishing & General Purpose Text Setting Ubiquity:
Average use Category:
20th century Serif Roman Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Modern hybrid | | Design history:
Charter is a successful contemporary text face with small capitals, ligatures and non-lining numerals, rather Dutch in style. As with the Meta, Lucida and Stone families, Charter was designed in the mid 1980s for low resolution output on laserprinters. As a consequence it has slab-like serifs, an open counter and a generous x-height. The serif structure particularly, was designed to take up less computer memory on the new Apple Macintosh computers and Postscript raster image processors (RIPs) that were beginning to take over the typesetting industry. BT Charter has since been redrawn for the new Opentype standard as Charter BT Pro. | |  |
