Font for US WWII serial numbers on tail

I believe this font might work for you:



http://www.dafont.com/en/voir.php?libelle=Amarillo+USAF

Whatya think?

A couple months back someone was looking for the font for a B-52. I don't know if that is the same font used in WW2, but it was called Alamo or something. I'll see if I can find again where to get it. I do remember that the one site I found back then that had it required a fee or payment to download and use it.

Hope this helps,

stinger

That's it! Amarillo. I knew it was a Texas town. Thanks for correcting me Rooster. You got your post in just seconds before my first one.

Just did a quick search and came up with this.

http://hans.presto.tripod.com/fonts/usaaf.html

Hope this helps.

stinger

Sweeet!

Thanks Rooster and stinger!

lol, I beat stinger by 50 seconds. LOL. It is a good font. I don't know if you have to pay for it. I paid for the key about 1 year ago. But I know the maker of the font at least gives you a limiited option to use the font to see if you like it.

Rooster - That's what happens when one gets stuck in a small town (in Texas no less, LOL) with only a 36000 baud connection! But you had the right answer. Good on ya!

Quagmyre - I hope they work out for you. I downloaded the Amarillo and a German font to check them out. I haven't figured out how to apply them to my word processor yet, though. Let us know if they work for you.

Best regards,

stinger

Yup they work. I had to modify one of them for some stenciling on one plane. According to the photos I've collected it doesn't look like stenciling of the serial numbers was all that consistent across planes during WWII.

I use Photoshop and Publisher for modifying stuff and creating the decals. I try to avoid Word in working with graphics and page layouts. Powerpoint will work ok if you don't have Publisher or Pagemaker.

Stinger...36000 baud? I hope you really mean 36.6 K instead. When I taught at a college in the early and mid-80 we finally managed to get the first typesetter to interface with the college mainframe computer using a ACOUTIC (yes, speaker to speaker) modem going a blazing (not) 300 baud. We would start the typesetter on a Friday night then signal the people at the mainframe computer to go and by Monday morning we should have had a class schedule stored in the (!!) 7 1/2" floppy disk. Air conditioning power spikes plus a noisy telephone connection always ruined the run.

Sting...If you have the Amarillo font you should just be able to drag the typeface into your font folder. This is assuming you are using a PC. Then the font will work in Word. I just tried it and no problemo.

QUOTE: Originally posted by roosterfish Sting...If you have the Amarillo font you should just be able to drag the typeface into your font folder. This is assuming you are using a PC. Then the font will work in Word. I just tried it and no problemo.

It might take a restart of Word a couple of times for it to show up. The fonts did not appear in my list until I restarted Word after installing them.

Here's a great online font browser tool to preview your fonts through. If it shows up in this it'll show up in Word, or any other program using fonts.

http://www.stcassociates.com/lab/fontbrowser.html

Well, I'll be darned, Quagmyre. What a great little site to see what fonts are in my computer. It is almost scares me that the site can probe and get my fonts. You learn something new everyday. Thanks!

I believe Eagle Strike makes a 1/48 scale set in the correct font, in both black and white, (and others?) I have the black and white sets, and each comes with two sheets, something like 8 by 5 inches. It has numerals and letters in several different sizes.

My Amarillo USAF font has variation of letters and numbers. For instance I can have a variation of four different "6"s. There are four variations of , "1,4,6,7". Then there are three variations of, "F,R,Z". And the options include different, "-, the Air Force Star enclosed in the circle". Variations of letters are access by using the SHIFT KEY or the ALT then code key. The font is in TrueType so it is resizeable.

Amarillo USAF font should cover most of the military models.

i have the eagle strike sheets. the numbers are good in many sizes but the letters dont have that variety. was looking for this about a week ago should have looked closer.

joe

Rooster - Yes I meant 36k, but isn't that the same as 36,000? I thought K stood for 1,000. Maybe my ignorance, as I'm not all that great with 'puters.
Thanks for the tips though, I'll try it out today maybe. Thanks to Quag, too for the advice.

An acoustic modem, eh? Those were the early days.
When I first attended the Univ. of Colo. back in the early '70's, they had just set up a card reader (yes, punch cards) in the Engineering Bldg. The main processor was across the parking lot and across the street at another facility about a quarter mile away. They would microwave the info back and forth to run the programs. Whenever it rained, the system wouldn't work. It took many months for them to figure out that the length of the microwave was close enough to the size of a raindrop to be absorbed by the drops. Sounds weird, but that's what the Prof's told us.

stinger

Big dishes and acoustic modems. It was so high tech in the early 80s. We sure did a lot of work for a little gain. Look how easy it all is now and everyone can do it with minimum effort.

Hmmm? I have to get back on topic. We had a Linotype/Intertype and Ludlow typesetter and finally switch to Compugraphic electronic typesetters. Comp IV, a one-liner, was the first. Then the school got a Comp that could save files on the 7 1/2-inch floppies...wow back then. Mind you that the newer Comp was six feet long and it took four people to move it. It used four removable film fonts at a time that worked on a rotating drum. To get different sized fonts the system had a rotating lens system. The school was on a strict budget back then so we could only afford eight fonts for $3,200. We all fought for our favorite fonts. I wanted my favorites that I had used for years and got my Century and Century Bold font. Helios font was a compromise. We got others that I don't remember. But the worst font we got was at the insistence of Ava, the head typesetter, and we had to live with it forever. I got so sick of the font she picked and has to be the pinnacle of 70s and 80s fonts. I still can't stand it today. I suppose if I did a model of a car from 1980 I'd have to use Ava's favorite font...BAUHAUS (Bold). I still shiver when I hear the name. That display font got so overused!

Designer Edward Benguiat, 1975

Its fun to see some old school graphics guys in here. We had much of the same equipment and thought we were doing pretty well when we had the old linotype machines.

There used to be a trade rag called U&lc (Upper and lower case) that was a type designers periodical that had articles and info on new and old type faces as well as their designers and wat was going on in the industry. Those were the days. We even used to make our own presstype. Oh to have that equipment today to make my own dry transfers.....

Type faces are pretty easy to match up. The hard part is narrowing down a font name. The font names are copyright protected but not the font. So what is called Bauhaus in one might be called Bowman in another. Font companies are always ripping each other off and they try to keep the names similar to ride other compainies coat tails in reagards to recognizing their fonts.

You can still find sheets of different colored letraset and chartpak dry transfer lettering in almost any font available. We called it presstype. The sheets come in sets of different font sizes and sometimes sheets of numbers. Years ago, it used to be a pretty common practice to aquire a presstype, letraset or chartpak catalog which had all the fonts availiable. You would then spend sleepless hours xeroxing the pages of these catalogs to get the differnt types and cut and paste till you were blind.
When scanning became more common, there were some pretty harp graphic programs out there that would scan the pages of these catalogs and then turn them into resident typefaces. It was about then that the font companies got smart and either put a screen over the top of the letters or only used partial alphbets and eventually just stopped printing the catalogs all together.

Anyway, (sorry for the rambling) keep an eye out in some of the art stores or engineering supply stores for the dry transfer sheets. They can still be had for a couple of $ each.

Mike