ArrowFont 2.0

Published Oct 14, 2019. Last updated Jan 24, 2020.

Luc(as) de Groot produced his first commercial variable font in 1992, before having the Internet or PDF files. This was an arrow font for a signage company in London. By moving the sliders for weight and angle, 18 different arrows could be fine-tuned so that they would be a match for any typeface.

He prepared two non-editable documents with embedded images, which are reproduced below. The first one explained how to install the font. The second file told designers how to use the font. The files – reproduced below – could be opened with SimpleText, the default text application on pre-OSX Macs (the successor of SimpleText, named TextEdit, can still open these documents, but refuses to display the embedded images).