MFF DIN 1451 . . .

DIN 1451 is a German standard for road, rail and aircraft lettering that has been around since the beginning of the 20th Century. The original idea for the font was that you could produce standardised lettering for road signs and so on using a ruler and a set of compasses by making use of a grid. There would be no need for a set of letters of the correct size because you would be able to make your own. For example, a capital 'H' would be seven units high and in the narrow font, three wide.

Circles have radii that are multiples of the grid spacing as well, although the 3x7 or 5x7 basic grid can be subdivided into 1/2s and 1/4s.

I have produced two fonts - one the condensed (Engschrift) and the other is the normal width (Mittelschrift) - the idea is that you use the Mittelschrift unless there is not enough space.

In addition, I have provided a version of each that has the Gurmukhi characters echoed down to the ASCII range so they occupy that as well as the Gurmukhi Unicode range in the two fonts - thus, there are four fonts.

Here, the outlines follow the original version of DIN 1451 - noticed quite easily from the '6' and '9' - even Linotype's 'FF DIN' font has been messed around with so the ASCII characters here are more like the original than in the font that you would pay serious money for.

Note that in the case of the two fonts that have the Gurmukhi characters in the ASCII range - the 'A' fonts - the default numbers are the Latin numbers. You can change a Latin number into a Gurmukhi character number by following it with two hash marks as in the diagram on the right. Thus, to get a Gurmukhi six, first press the '6' key then follow it with two '#'s to make '6##'. If you are using this font for body text instead of as a display font and there are lots of numbers, you can simply use search and replace to add the hash marks.

Examples of artwork with MFF DIN 1451 . . .
click on the images to open them up full-sized in another tab...

Hover the mouse over the images below to show examples of font characters and weights

Download MFF DIN 1451 . . .

Download MFF DIN 1451 Engschrift TrueType font (Gurmukhi text in the Gurmukhi Unicode range and Latin text in the ASCII range.)
mffdin1451_na.ttf	76,148 bytes
Download MFF DIN 1451 Mittelschrift TrueType font (Gurmukhi text in the Gurmukhi Unicode range and Latin text in the ASCII range.)
mffdin1451_nn.ttf	76,700 bytes
Download MFF DIN 1451 Engschrift A TrueType font (Gurmukhi text in the Gurmukhi Unicode range and Gurmukhi text in the ASCII range.)
mffdin1451_wa.ttf	82,068 bytes
Download MFF DIN 1451 Mittelschrift A TrueType font (Gurmukhi text in the Gurmukhi Unicode range and Gurmukhi text in the ASCII range.)
mffdin1451_wn.ttf	81,356 bytes

Have you got the latest version of one of these fonts? If you have just downloaded it from this site, you have. Otherwise, you can check any font file by comparing the hash function results of the file on your computer with the values in the list by clicking here for text file and here for a web page - opens in a new tab. Select the font file on your system and look at the properties. Compare the hash result against the values in the table. These pages are kept up-to-date so whenever I update a font or create a new one, it will be on there.

Download All Fonts

You can download all of the fonts from all of the font families on this site in one compressed archive by clicking here for a ZIP file or here for a TAR.GZ file

You have the freedom to use these fonts for personal or commercial use although you are forbidden to: charge for them; or, modify and distribute the modified font. If you want something different or even completely new for a specific purpose, email me - see below.

I allow you to use my fonts for free because I believe that morally, everybody should have equal access, regardless of availability of resources - In this way, those who genuinely have not got the money to pay a license fee for a font use can continue to access this resource for free. If I insisted on charging for them for private/non-commercial use then you would be looking at anything from around £50 for a single user.

If you are using the fonts for business purposes, you are not facing bankruptcy and your business model includes paying those that have produced resources that you are using, then you might want to consider making a contribution towards the time, artistic and technological investment that I have made in these fonts as well as the ongoing costs of running and maintaining a production server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

To give you an idea of what the commercial use charges are: the charge for a book is GBP100; and, for a single multinational film production, GBP1,000. Websites are free. If you are paying me for use, or just want to make a contribution, make sure that you send me any details you want to me to publish so that they can go on the contributors' page.

To make a contribution, click here ...

If you want to make a contribution directly using PayPal, my email address is paul.alan.grosse@gmail.com and please include your name and if relevant, your company and the project so that they can be included on the contributors page with a link if appropriate.

To see a list of contributors, click here.

Thank you.

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Copyright ©2007-2023 Paul Alan Grosse.