JAF LaptureBuy

Leipziger Antiqua

JAF Lapture is based on the Leipziger Antiqua by Albert Kapr, released in 1971 by the East German foundry Typoart. It has been digitized, extended and carefully redesigned by Tim Ahrens in 2002-05.

The strong calligraphic characteristics are a result of the design process: “The size of the counters and the width of individual characters at small optical sizes were analyzed with a steel pen while the letter shapes were designed in larger size with a specially trimmed reed pen. Sometimes the hand is more innovative than the head alone,” says Kapr.

Gothic and Latin

A unique feature of this font is the introduction of gothic shapes into a latin typeface. “The basic concept is to string together narrow white hexagons as counters and inter-letter spaces, defined by vertical stems and triangular serifs. The interior spaces are at least as important as the strokes that make up the characters.”

JAF Lapture is an ideal choice if a reference to gothic style is desired, as true black letter types are often too eye-catching and not as legible as latin fonts for unfamiliar readers.

“The last few years have seen a number of very elegant typefaces based on the mellow and feminine renaissance model. However, sometimes we require a font that is strong and robust, harmonic yet rigid,” says designer Tim Ahrens.

Digitization

When the Leipziger Antiqua was digitized several scans of different optical sizes were used. Hot metal as well as photocomposition samples were used as a model for JAF Lapture.

For the regular text size every letter was digitized independently three times from the same text and later interpolated on the computer.

This procedure removed irregularities that occur in every letter during the printing process. Even though in today's high quality printing the letters look perfectly identical, the result is not a synthetic typeface that is cleaned to death. The warmth and rough texture of the original is preserved.

Designing the bold

Since the original did not include any bold weight, the first attempt was to extrapolate the bold master from the existing regular and semi bold weights:

It was obvious that the bold weight would require a new design. The extrapolation also revealed some inconsistencies between the regular and semi bold original. The new design shows much more consistent characteristics and serifs. It is based on the principles of the regular weight in a conscious design process.

The semi bold weight, which was derived from this design, harmonizes better than the original with the regular weights.

Improving consistency

Some details of the letter shapes were carefully redesigned to make them more consistent:

Adjusting the capitals

The biggest challenge were the characteristics of the capital letters, that were “too latin” compared to that of the small letters with their heavy horizontal strokes.

Like in some historical documents that combine latin and black letter typefaces, the capitals did not seem to be part of the text.

JAF Lapture

The fonts are provided in OpenType format. Each font contains more than 600 glyphs, including true small caps, nine sorts of figures, contextual and stylistic alternates and accented characters. This means that you only need to purchase one font whereas in other families you would have to buy two or three fonts in order to get the same. Technically, they follow the Adobe Pro fonts and provide the same glyph set and OpenType functionality.