CALVERIN TYPEWORKS

A working reference on typography for design students, letterpress people, and anyone who sets text and wants to know why the result looks the way it does. Every idea here is a control you can move. Drag a slider and the letterform on the plate actually changes shape. No screenshots, no video, no connection required.

A BENCH, NOT AN ALBUM The whole thing is built like a compositor's manual: monospace readouts, hairline rules, a figure tag in the corner of every plate, and numbers that say so when a value leaves spec. Clear enough for a first year student, precise enough that a working typesetter will not roll their eyes.

THE BENCH One specimen glyph, four instruments, eight live readouts. • Six letters to choose from, each with its own metrics table • Size, weight, width and tracking on tick marked sliders • Overlays for metric guides, counters, stroke skeletons and blueprint mode • X-height ratio, set width, contrast, stress axis and aperture recompute as you work

ANATOMY Sixteen parts of the letterform, studied one at a time. Each gets a plate with the part picked out in red, a slider that genuinely deforms it, a side by side of the two extremes, and a short note on where the shape stops working. Serif parts, sans parts and shared parts filter separately.

THE CATALOG Eighteen faces across nine classes, sorted the way a foundry sorts rather than alphabetically: • Garalde, transitional, didone, slab serif • Grotesque, geometric sans, humanist sans • Monospace and textura Every face opens as a specimen sheet: pangram, a seven step size waterfall from 8 to 72 point, a nine row metrics table, and honest notes on what the face is for and what it will ruin.

KERNING BENCH Twelve pairs with a right answer. Drag the second letter until the fit looks correct, reveal the reference value, then read your deviation in thousandths of an em. A short paragraph explains why that pair sits where it does. Your running average is kept between sessions.

THE GRID A two page spread with margins, columns, gutter, leading and a baseline module all under your hands. Four classical presets to start from, including the Van de Graaf canon. The readout flags a measure that runs past 75 characters, a leading ratio outside 1.20 to 1.80, or a text block that will not divide into whole modules, then tells you in one line what to do about it.

PRESS ROOM Four colour separation under a loupe. Toggle cyan, magenta, yellow and black, change screen ruling from 85 to 200 lines per inch, push dot gain, switch dot shape, and watch the rosette form or fall apart. Underneath sit a registration target, a trap band, and a knockout against overprint comparison.

REFERENCE • A glossary of 67 terms with cross references that jump to the related entry • A converter across points, picas, didots, millimetres and pixels, with ciceros and inches alongside • Ten paper formats and eight weights, with caliper and bleed guidance • Nine stops of history, from the punchcutter's bench to the variable font

FIELD NOTES Bookmark any face, part or term, write your own notes against it, and mark a section mastered once you are finished with it. A compositor card totals up what you have covered and issues you a serial. All of it stored on the device. No account, no network, no tracking.