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Boing Boing

Digitizing vintage proportional typewriter fonts

Rob Beschizza
May 12, 2026
∙ Paid

Forbidden Ferrero Rocher. Photo: IBM

IBM’s Selectric Composer was a special edition of the famed business-class typewriter that used proportional type instead of fixed-width characters, allowing the typist to create beautifully typeset documents that appeared printed, decades before computers made it easy. Now we have computers, though, we want the fancy…

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