Vale Pro Font

The Vale Press was one of the Arts & Crafts presses founded in London in
1896 during the revival of fine book-making. While not so well known as Morris's Kelmscott Press, the types used by the Vale Press were designed by the artist Charles Ricketts, who also supervised the design and printing of Vale Press books. The main type used in Vale imprints was called the "Vale Type". Vale, like William Morris's Golden type, was based on the Jenson 15th century model and exemplifies the classic roman printing type style.

The King’s Fount was an experimental semi-uncial font based on the Vale type, and while a bit unusual, Ricketts was quite font of his creation. "The Kingis Quair" was designed in 1903 for the Vale edition of the 15h century poem. This semi-uncial font evokes old English and Anglo-Saxon lettering. Both Vale and King's Fount share many characters designed by Ricketts with punches cut by Edward Prince (who cut almost all of the British private press type punches). The Vale Press closed in 1904, at which time Ricketts destroyed the typefaces. The digitization of these faces, by Colin Kahn, are true to the original design’s intentions but are drawn with clean,
rather than distressed, outlines.

Vale Pro

Vale Pro combines the two fonts: P22 Vale Roman and P22 Vale King’s Fount. The Pro Opentype font also includes Central European character sets, old style figures, fractions and a special "Middle English" feature to make any text "Olde". For those without Opentype savvy applications, the single King's and Roman fonts are included individually.

Pro features:

TITLING feature invokes King’s Fount alternates, as does SS02 and the
stylistic alternates feature

SWASH feature invokes faux Middle English, as does SS01.
**The OpenType scripting for the Middle English feature was adapted by Colin Kahn from a Python script by Mark Pilgrim. This features does not claim to actually convert text to Middle English but rather is an approximation loosely based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales**

Numeral features include: numerator figures, denominator figures, superior figures, inferior figures, fractions, slashed zero, proportional figures, tabular figures, proportional and tabular oldstyle figures.

Other features include
Case-sensitive forms
SS03 lets you change only the a series
SS04 lets you change only the e series
SS05 lets you change only the f
SS06 lets you change only the g series
SS07 lets you change only the r series
SS08 lets you change only the t series
SS09 lets you change only the E series
SS10 lets you change only the T series
SS11 lets you change only the paragraph symbol
SS12 lets you change numbers to capital Roman numerals
SS03 lets you change numbers to lowercase Roman numerals
There are also features for standard ligatures, historical forms (long s),
and ornaments.

Designed by Colin Kahn.