The Barchowsky Fonts

The exemplar fonts are used to create custom practice pages after being installed on either the Mac OS or Windows operating systems.

The Barchowsky Dot OT font is for beginners. Dots within the letters show the student where strokes should start. There is some minimal joining to assist development of maximum legibility.

tree river fun

The Barchowsky Fluent Hand OT font helps students learn how to join letters. The font has “contextual alternates” which join pairs of letters within the font. The contextual alternates can be turned on or off. With the alternates on, letters in the font are joined; with the alternates off letters are mostly unjoined. In other words, with Barchowsky Fluent Hand OT installed, two versions of the font are available, one joined and one unjoined.

Letters that are mostly unjoined are useful.

Joined letters make writing faster, while still legible.

This control over printing out exemplars with either joined or unjoined letters helps student who have learned the basic letter forms and are ready to learn how to join those letters. The joins are turned on or off through word processing program settings.

The features of the Barchowsky Fonts include joining of letters as instructed in the BFH program, guidelines, warm up exercise patterns, all diacritical marks for western languages and all math symbols.

Using the fonts

Windows

Microsoft Word displays Barchowsky Fluent Hand OT with the letters unjoined by default. This can be changed in the program settings.

Windows versions of Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop support all features of the fonts.

Mac OS

Microsoft Word displays Barchowsky Fluent Hand OT with the letters unjoined by default. This can be changed in the program settings.

Text Edit and Pages display Barchowsky Fluent Hand OT with the letters joined by default. This can be changed in the program settings.

Mellel supports all features of the fonts.

Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop support all features of the fonts.

Other platforms and apps

Please contact us with any questions about using the fonts with software that is not listed here.