Feinen was the font used for the titles and headings of the majority of OD&D products, most notably for the entire Gazetteer series. Additionally, it was the standard font for mapping until Korinna took over (first in Dragon, later in Champions of Mystara too). As such, all of us who know Mystara tend to associate Feinen with our world.
The version apparently used in TSR products was Feinen Bold, made by a company called Datascan. (See the excellent TSR & WotC Font FAQ.)
There are apparently two other versions, known as FC-Feinen (company unknown) and Furst, aka OPTIFurst (made by OptiFont/Castcraft Software). I have seen Furst firsthand, though I do not own it. Furst Bold is indeed very similar to Feinen.
Finally, there is a cloned version of Feinen, known as Baldur. It's made by Mad Irishman Productions, and you can buy it at myfonts.com for a mere US$12 or so. The current version does not include accents, but a new version is going to be released soon which includes both accents and some special characters like Cyrillic. (I have a beta version, which is how you can see accents on my maps already.)
Ideally, though, it would be great to have the actual font used in the original works. So, what would this cost us? Last year I e-mailed Datascan to find out.
Datascan wrote:
Well in theory I'm interested, but unless we manage to get 15+ users I can't really justify the expense.
Baldur may not be 100% accurate but it is close, and with the new version coming out soon, it does make it, (at least for me) hard to justify spending the extra money.
Thorf,
You've probably looked into the accuracy of Baldur the closest of use. How close percentage-wise would you say it is - and does your beta version offer everything you/we need?
Sorry I can't be more positive than that.
Regards
Gary
Well in theory I'm interested, but unless we manage to get 15+ users I can't really justify the expense.
I understand entirely. It's pretty expensive just to get the use of one font.
Baldur may not be 100% accurate but it is close, and with the new version coming out soon, it does make it, (at least for me) hard to justify spending the extra money.
Thorf,
You've probably looked into the accuracy of Baldur the closest of use. How close percentage-wise would you say it is - and does your beta version offer everything you/we need?
Do you really want to know the answer? :D
Unfortunately/fortunately, depending on how you look at things, the fact is that it is at least 90%, possibly as high as 99% depending on the character in question. And yes, the version I have has everything we need.
In fact, the only way to really tell the difference is to zoom in extremely close, or make the text really big (if you have access to all the fonts - which none of us do). I have compared a high quality scan of a map with Feinen with big fonts sizes of Baldur and Furst, and although I can see very minor differences, there is just no way you would notice unless you knew what to look for.
The only advantage that Feinen will probably have over Baldur is that as a professional font it will have much better metrics, kerning, etc. This means that the font will be ever so slightly clearer/smoother, and the spacing between characters will look better. But again, it would take a lot of study of the fonts in question to be able to tell which is which even then.
It's not what I want to be saying, but we do have in Baldur a very good, high quality alternative to spending a fortune on Feinen.
They don't have Feinen and sell Baldur for 22.00$
Well... I think myfont.com's Baldur (12.00$) will do very very very well! ;)
It is really perfect!
Hope you don't mind if I swipe some of this information for the FAQ!
I also searched Feinen and Baldur at font.com
They don't have Feinen and sell Baldur for 22.00$
Well... I think myfont.com's Baldur (12.00$) will do very very very well! ;)
It is really perfect!
It's not perfect, but it's certainly sufficient.
What can I say, I'd still like to get the real thing eventually. :D
Hey, Thorf!
Hope you don't mind if I swipe some of this information for the FAQ!
Be my guest.
It's a pretty thorough write-up of Feinen at least, especially if all the links are included.Eventually I'd like to know the names of all the fonts used in OD&D and Mystara products, but the normal typefaces are pretty hard to pin down. Does anyone have any other details on OD&D/Mystaran fonts?