Tabac Mono
Every non-proportional font is, in its essence, a little bizarre. The necessity to fit all of the characters of the alphabet into a predefined glyph width generally goes against any efforts for a unified font colour and for perfect alignment of pairs. Traditionally wide and dense uppercase letters are compressed as much as possible, while narrow open letterforms need distinctive serifs added to hide their excessive luminosity. The result is a somewhat hybrid alphabet, which on one hand doesn’t manifest perfect elegance, but on the other hand has its own specific charm. In light of, and despite these initial limitations, Tabac Mono represents a non-typical approach. Besides proven glyph design in the spirit of humanitarian tradition, it offers a wide palette of sixteen styles, including small capitals, true italics, and relatively extensive glyph tables. The regular styles and lower-scale letters work very well, easily fooling an inexperienced eye. It can function not only as an accessory to other font families, but also as a standalone font, a fact that will be appreciated by all typographers who consider a somewhat sparse typesetting and an absence of kerning an advantage, or even their personal agenda. A big advantage of the font family is a consistent width of all sixteen styles, so it is possible to switch between them without changing the typesetting. Tabac Mono extends the means of expression of the other fonts in the font superfamily, with which it shares several OpenType functions, including indexes, fractions, several types of numbers and alternative shapes of the most distinctive letters of the Latin alphabet (a, g, Q), which you can use to significantly influence the character of the final composition.
Design: Tomáš Brousil
Number of fonts in a family: 16 (Hair, Hair Italic, Thin, Thin Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Semibold, Semibold Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black, Black Italic)
Number of glyphs per font: 725
Release date: 2012
OpenType Features:
All Small Caps (c2sc)
Small Capitals (smcp)
Historical Forms (hist)
Discretionary Ligatures (dlig)
Old Style Numerals (onum)
Superscript (sups)
Scientific Inferiors (sinf)
Numerators (numr)
Denominators (dnom)
Fractions (frac)
Localized Forms (locl)
Case Sensitive Forms (case)
Stylistic Sets (salt ss02, ss03)