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Five unusual Latin fonts

1. Turner’s Human font. A font in which each letter is made out of people. Owing to the need of people to get up, stretch and pee from time to time, this makes any text written in Turner’s Human necessarily transient. In addition, since each letter in the Latin alphabet requires two or three people, the amount of text that can be set in Turner’s Human is necessarily limited by the population of the Earth. Currently, with a population of around 7 billion, just over half a billion words in English can be set, or enough for about ten copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  

2. Fontstars. A short-lived supergroup formed by Times New Roman (on serifs), Helvetica (on bold) and Arial (on kerning). Comic Sans was briefly a member of the group but contributed little besides excess punctuation marks. In later years Times New Roman and Helvetica left the group after an unspecified altercation, being replaced by Papyrus and, later on, Impact. Currently Arial’s involvement is on hiatus, though Papyrus and Comic Sans have been collaborating recently on some novelty text for Christmas.

3. Warrington’s Doctor Font. A font for expressing ambiguous or difficult-to-read cursive text in the modern age. Are you looking for a character which is half-way between a letter r and a letter n? What about a character that could be e or i? With letters such as ‘up-and-down squiggle’ and 'horizontal line with a dip in the middle’, Warrington’s Doctor is the perfect font for expressing unreadable writing in an electronic medium.

4. Dimensional flip text. Instead of proceeding straightforwardly left to right across the page, each letter in dimensional flip text hangs down into the page: that is, on the uppermost page, the part of each letter that is usually rightmost can be seen, and on each subsequent page below another letter slice is visible. Each piece of text therefore requires several pages. Dimensional flip text is extremely difficult to read unless you shave off the paper bit by bit to get to each letter in its hanging-down form. It is consequently useful for text which is intentionally transient.

5. Brick shithouse. With serifs of 100% pure brick and character weight that can be used to stun a burglar, brick shithouse is the font of choice for angry ransom demands and letters to the Daily Mail.

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