BOSTON LINE and PHILADELPHIA LINE fonts each have an unusual sanserif design, quirky letterforms, and rounded mechanical strokes that suggest template lettering or machine-readable fonts. Boston is lowercase only, Philadelphia is a bit more conventional including upper and lowercase. These were inspired by 2 different 19th-century educators’ attempts to make a raised-letter alphabet for the blind. Eventually, the dot grid of Braille would prove easier to use, but Samuel Gridley Howe’s legacy lives on at Boston’s Perkins School, as does Julius Friedlander’s at Philadelphia’s Overbrook School.

Version 1.5 has an expanded character set and improved spacing and kerning. In the original designs, all the letters were aligned on the baseline, including letters with descenders. I have lowered them to their conventional positions, retaining the original raised ones as alternates.