Truchet & Types

Le Romain du roi, bitmaps, outlines and hints in 1695

Sébastien Truchet, 1657-1729.

The 1998 ATypI congress was held in the city of Lyon.
Lyon was the home town of father Sébastien Truchet who was born there in 1657. Few people realise the key role he played in the history of typography.
Here, let us look at what is perhaps the first ever digital font, the Romain du Roi.

Recall of the previous episode: father Sébastien Truchet was appointed by Louis XIV to contribute to the work on the Bignon Commission for the purpose of compiling an encyclopaedia of trades and professions. The first of these that the Bignon Commission examined was printing.

The commission then turned its attention to existing characters used in printing. Three of its members (Truchet, Jaugeon and Des Billettes) undertook to design (sic) "new French letters that we have endeavoured to render as agreeable as possible to the eye". These characters broke with the Garamond tradition. Their originality, explained by Stanley Morison and later by André Jammes, lay in the premise that (sic) "the art of printing is not a branch of writing but of engraving". These three academics produced characters for printing plates (engraved by Simoneau) in the Romain du Roi font that Grandjean later used in Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand in 1702. (N.B. This character was recently digitised by Frank Jalleau under the name of Grandjean - IN).

Although usually attributed to Jaugeon (the only member of the Bignon Commission who came ffrom a typographic background), the contribution of a "technician" like Truchet was without doubt decisive. Indeed, all the manuscripts that have been preserved were all signed by Truchet (see Scale of body sizes). Their design is attributable to André Jammes and James Mosley. While Simoneau's printing plates have been reproduced many times, his hand-written notes are little known. Yet these are the equivalent of today's AFMs (Metrics Font ) or hinting instructions.

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Cartoons of Romain du roi'"G", using outlines with circle arcs (design by Truchet, engraved by Simmoneau).

These researchers who lived three hundred years ago were unquestionable geniuses:

They invented the notion of the "vectorial font" by defining characters in terms of outlines with approximation by arcs of a circle (interpolation by arcs of a circle was still used by Bitsream less than ten years ago before the Bézier splines). Characters had already been drawn with a ruler and compass since the 15th century by people like the Italian Félice Feliciano and later by Albrecht Durer and Tory (Morison published a study on the subject). The innovation came from the use of a fine grid (roughly the equivalent of a resolution of 2300 dpi).
They invented the concept of the bitmap.
They invented the notion of the "slanted" character (the Romain du roi has no italic form but comprises characters that geometrically slant by deformation of their axes). They associated to these glyphic specifications a number of tables or commentaries which are the equivalent of today's AFM's (FM as in Font Métrics), or hints.

Romain du roi typeface includes all the features of today digital typeface except that it is three hundred years old !

Background reading:

John Dreyfus, Aspects of French Eighteenth Century Typography - A study of type specimens in the Broxbourne Collection at Cambridge University Library, Printed for presentation to members of The Roxburghe Club, Cambridge 1982.
Pierre-Fournier dit le jeune, Manuel typographique utile aux gens de lettres, et à ceux qui exercent les différentes parties de l'Art de l'Imprimerie, chez l'auteur, Paris, 1764. Réédité en anglais : The Manuel Typographique of Pierre-Simon Fournier le jeune together with Fournier on Typefounding An English translation of the Text by Harry Carter in facsimile, With an Introduction and Notes by James Mosley, trois volumes ; Darmstadt, 1995.
André Jammes, La naissance d'un caractère : le Grandjean -- la réforme de la typographie royale sous Louis XIV, Librairie Paul Jammes (1961) et Promodis, 1985.
Stanley Morison, Letter Forms, Hartleys & Marks publishers Inc. (2nde édition), 1996.
James Mosley, « French academicians and modern typography: designing new types in the 1690s », Monotype Conference, Cambridge, September 1992, 14 pages ; traduit en français par Alan Marshall, à paraître.
Jacques André, formaly Irisa/Inria-Rennes
Denis Girou, CNRS,Orsay

October 1998 (English version by 5/5 Rennes).

Truchet The Point Romain du roi Tiling systems