cyk­lop – The Cy­clop type­face

The Cy­clop type­face was de­signed in the 1920s at the work­shop of War­saw type foundry “Odlew­nia Cz­cionek J. Idzkowski i S-ka”. This sans serif type­face has a highly mod­u­lated stroke so it has high ty­po­graphic con­trast. The ver­ti­cal stems are much heav­ier then hor­i­zon­tal ones. Most char­ac­ters have thin rect­an­gles as ad­di­tional coun­ters giv­ing the unique shape of the char­ac­ters.
The lead types of Cy­clop type­face were pro­duced in slanted vari­ant at sizes 8-48 pt. It was heav­ily used for heads in news­pa­pers and ac­ci­dents prints. Type­set­ters used Cy­clop in the in­ter-war pe­riod, dur­ing the oc­cu­pa­tion in the un­der­ground press. The type­face was used un­til the be­gin­nings of the off­set print and com­puter type­set­ting era. Nowa­days it is hard to find the metal types of this type­face.
The font was gen­er­ated us­ing the Me­tatype1 pack­age. Then the orig­i­nal set of char­ac­ters was com­pleted by adding the full set of ac­cented let­ters and char­ac­ters of the mod­ern Latin al­pha­bets (in­clud­ing Viet­namese).
The up­right vari­ant was gen­er­ated and it was more com­pli­cated task than it ap­peared at the be­gin­ning. 11 up­right let­ters of the Cy­clop type­face were pre­sented in the book by Filip Trza­ska, “Pod­stawy tech­niki wydawniczej” (“Foun­da­tion of the pub­lish­ing techonol­ogy”), War­saw 1967. But even the au­thor of the book does not know what was the source of the pre­sented ex­am­ples.
The fonts are dis­tributed in the Type1 and OpenType for­mats along with the files nec­es­sary for use these fonts in TeX and LaTeX in­clud­ing en­cod­ing def­i­ni­tion files: T1 (ec), T5 (Viet­namese), OT4, QX, tex­nansi and non­stan­dard ones (IL2 for Czech fonts).