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A Manual of Comparative Typography: The Panose System

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The Panose System, published in October of 1987, brings to light the thinking that brought the Panose System into the Typeface and Computer Font world. It was developed by Benjamin Bauermeister, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960.

In working with Typefaces, he found them jammed into illogical sequences based inexactly on when or where they were first used and the names of the persons that modified them. He sought a method of organizing them into some logical order based on form and shape. This book is the result of his original ideas.

In 1990 he was the co-founder with Clyde McQueen of ElseWare Corporation in Seattle, where he first used his Panose 1 Typeface Matching System which began as a 7 digit number.
Each succeeding digit broke the font collection down into ever smaller groups.

Elseware Co. Was purchased by Hewlett Packard Co. and PANOSE was expanded to ten digits, each containing a value varying from 0-15 which works great in Hexadecimal. Panose1 became Panose2., or now, just Panose.

Basically, a Panose Number consists of ten digits, each digit containing a value between 0 and 15 entered into the OS/2 Table of the Rich Font Description (RFD) incorporated into each True Type font.

At present, the first digit can hold any of six values:
0 = Any (a non-Panosed font)
1 = No assigned Font is similar.
2 = Latin Text (where Serif Style is most important).
3 = Handwritten (Script - flowing or non flowing, where Tool Kind is most important)
4 = Decorative (where Class - Topology and Decoration - are most important)
5 = Symbol (Pictorial, no alphabet. - Borders, Dingbats, Drawings, Silhouettes)

HP began reaching out for Partners to make PANOSE an industry wide standard.
Panose Partners have included: AGFA (MonoType); Hewlett Packard Co. (FontSmart); Adobe Corp. (PageMaker); Bitstream Inc.; Caere Corp.; Corel Corp. (CorelDRAW); Lotus Development Corp.; No Hands Inc. (Common Ground); and Microsoft Corp (Word Pro).

The Panose System is now used in most commercial True Type Fonts (TTF) Sold.