☙ Font Foundry ❧
Þe Alde Font Shop
Welcome to the Alde Font Shop, featuring the Renaissance-era fonts of 16th-century London printer John Alde, faithfully-reproduced in digital format and now enhanced with the full extended character sets (accented letters, etc.), Greek character sets, numerous ligatures and symbols, fractions and alternative fractions, and many other improvements which simply weren’t possible in days of yore — a typographic project half a millennium in the making! If your browser supports embedded fonts, these are the fonts that you’re seeing used throughout this web page (but as yet not elsewhere on this site — that’s a work-in-progress which is much more long-term).
Þe Alde Font Family
The Alde family is currently comprised of five fonts, each of which are available for free download in both a desktop (TrueType) version, as well as a webfont version (both WOFF and WOFF2 formats included).
Scroll down on this page to preview the fonts in more detail before downloading, and/or test them out using any text of your own!
Þe Alde Blacke Magick
Version 1.08
Alde Blacke Magick is the “headliner” (in every sense) of the Alde font family, quite suitable for titling and headings, or it can be used for emphasis in place of bold (which is lacking in this family, as bold fonts, per se, did not exist in the Renaissance era), and it most certainly could be used as the main text font for one’s project, if apropos.
Includes:
Basic & Extended Latin Character Sets
Basic Greek Character Set
Standard & Alternative Fractions
Lining Figures
Numerous Symbols
Multinational Currency
plus more than 130 ligatures!
Þe Alde Antiqua Romane
Version 1.09
The “regular” text font in the Alde family.
If you install Antiqua Romane, and are hoping to also use italics in your text, be sure to also install Antiqua Italick (below). Most software will be able to give you “faux italics” by using only the regular font, but those will be nothing close to the actual italics font in this family.
Includes:
Basic & Extended Latin Character Sets
Complete Greek Character Set
Standard & Alternative Fractions
Lining Figures
Numerous Symbols
Multinational Currency
Built-In Small-Caps
plus more than 70 ligatures!
Þe Alde Antiqua Italick
Version 1.09
The near-fanciful italic to accompany the regular text font.
Includes:
Basic & Extended Latin Character Sets
Complete Greek Character Set
Standard & Alternative Fractions
Lining Figures
Numerous Symbols
Multinational Currency
plus more than 100 ligatures!
Þe Alde Paltrye Cappes
Version 1.07
A modern creation of the present designer, being a small-capitals version of Antiqua Romane.
Includes:
Basic & Extended Latin Character Sets
Standard & Alternative Fractions
Lining Figures
Numerous Symbols
Multinational Currency
plus more than 20 ligatures!
Þe Alde Night Cappes
Version 1.03
Alde Night Cappes is a decorative initial font based on the Blacke Magick blackletter font, set into various backgrounds of 15th-century designs by the French printer Mathieu Husz.
Includes:
Basic Latin Character Set (uppercase only)
Standard & Alternative Fractions
Lining Figures
Numerous Symbols
Multinational Currency
plus 4 ligatures!
Preview þe Alde Fonts
You can preview all four of the main Alde fonts — Alde Antiqua (both regular and italic), Alde Paltrye Cappes, and Alde Blacke Magick — below, perusing the various sample texts via the drop-down box, or just type in any text of your own that you might like to try out! And be sure to check out the various OpenType Features (OTF) options that you can choose from, too — although bear in mind that not all end-user software can take advantage of those features (most of the popular word processing programs cannot, but other professional design software such as Adobe’s Photoshop or InDesign, etc. are fully OTF-capable, of course).
Note that the Alde Night Cappes font has not been included in this preview form, simply because there’s not very much to “play around with,” really — it’s a very limited font, basically just the uppercase characters (and some ligatures) and is meant to be used simply as decorative initials (like I have here, at the top of this page), but you can naturally view what’s contained in that font via the PDF of it’s character set... or just download, install, and try it out yourself!
The font preview script on this page has been adapted from the WOFF test script for FontCreator professional type design software. Many thanks to Erwin Denissen and High-Logicfor kind permission to use it here on this site.
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