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Blaise cipher fonts

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Blaise

Blaise samples


Blaise is a collection of three fonts: Blaise, Blaise Round, and Blaise Block, based on an old and mostly forgotten cipher. Each of these has four styles, and in the case of Blaise Round, different shapes in uppercase and lowercase. That works out to 16 different forms of this cipher, which can be seen in the example at the right. They are a simple substitution cipher, but their striking appearance makes them suitable for many forms of nonhuman alphabets or other crypitc uses.

This collection of fonts is useful for many different purposes. In a fantasy game, a race such as dwarves might use the square versions, while a less dour race might prefer any of the round or curved ones. In a SF game, some of these are just crying out to be an alien alphabet, partiuclarly Blaise Round and Blaise Block. In any genre, any one of these could be the writing of a secret society.  Any form of Blaise Block can look, not like writing, but like a mere border or frieze, not immediately recognizable as writing at all!

This in particular would be a great thing for an escape room -- a page of apparent clues is actually bogus; the real clue is the decorative border, which is, perhaps, Blaise Block Bold.

De Vigenère's original included no punctuation; in this implementation, symbols have been added for the period and comma.  Also, the underscore _ and hyphen - are alternates for the space character -- that is, in versions where the space is an actual character (forms of Blaise Block) they are blanks, while where space is the usual blank, they are alternate characters that can be used in its place to allow for unbroken lines. (though you will have to manage line breaks yourself in the case of underscore)

Blaise de Vigenère

A Bit of Cipher History:

Blaise de Vigenère is popularly believed to be the creator of the Vigenere cipher; actually, Giovan Battista Bellaso first published it. De Vigenère did, however, write a fascinating book on ciphers and secret writing, entitled Traicté des Chiffres ou Secrètes Manières d'Escrire. It is, unfortunately, in French, and available in scans only (the few originals sell for thousands of dollars).  That is all rather limiting, at least to a non-French-speaking font designer.

However, even if the text is difficult to read (though knowing another Romance language helps) the illustrations are fascinating. Many different ciphers are pictured, many of them familiar, but one apparently entirely unique: the drawings that make up the first version of Blaise in the examples to the right.

The other 15 versions are riffs on the original. It exists in calligraphic, bold, and weathered varieties. It is in round forms, outline forms, and block strips. Some versions are combinations of all of these. And these are, as far as can be determined, completely unique among computer typefonts.

FONT LICENSE INFORMATION: Wintertree fonts are licensed as ordinary commerical fonts. This means you can install the font on your computer to use with programs such as word processors, design tools and similar applications, and use it for creation of print or PDF documents, images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, etc.) and logos. In other words, you can use the Wintertree fonts to make things with and sell the things you make, but you can't sell the font itself in any way, or use it as a web font (@font-face). Credit is gratefully appreciated but not required.

The font used for the title text in the product graphic is Remington, from The Vaults of McTavish.

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Product Information
Publisher Stock #
2201
File Size:
3.92 MB
Format
Original electronic Click for more information
Scanned image
These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.
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Original electronic format
These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.
File Last Updated:
December 04, 2017
This title was added to our catalog on November 30, 2017.