Introduction to Layering with LTR Federal

At first glance the fonts folder of LTR Federal may look a bit daunting. What are all these fonts for? How are they used? Follow these easy steps to understanding LTR Federal.

Four optical masters

Only so many shaded lines fit on a character. When the character is small there is not so much space to draw on. A bigger letter has more room and can fit more lines. At least, it was like this when these letters were engraved by hand. Digital fonts can scale one shape from 1 point to thousands of points. But the shading will break if it is used too small! And if it is used too large it will look coarse and rough. What to do?
So LTR Federal has four different levels of detail in the shading. The level is indicated in the font names. "Federal Six Line" has six shading lines on the height of a capital. To be used in small sizes or low resolutions. The scale moves up to Nine lines, Twelve lines and finally Eighteen lines for large sizes. This diagram shows the appropriate optical size applied. You can see the shading gets finer when the type gets bigger. This is a nice effect, but you have to make it work!

Layering

The second step in understanding LTR Federal is the layering. The shaded coloring effects don't come straight out of the fonts. You have to stack a couple of different fonts on top of each other to build the variations. This diagram shows the layering at work. The left column shows the intermediate steps. The right column shows the font that is added to the stack.



This is best done in some sort of graphics application, like Illustrator or Freehand. Create an object with the text, size and location you need. Select one of the four optical sizes, for instance Eighteen Line (as in this diagram), then choose the one of the drop-shadow shadings: named HShadow for the horizontal shade lines and DShadow for diagonal shadelines. Set the font color for the Shadow layer.
Duplicate this text box and paste it straight on top of the first one. It is important that the second box has exactly the same location - otherwise the layering won't match. Change the font of the text in the second layer to the Bevel weight of the optical size you chose for the first layer. Set the font color for the Bevel layer.
Duplicate the last textbox again, place it on top of the other two and set the font to Federal Regular. Set the font color for the Regular layer.
Duplicate the last textbox, place it on top of the other two and set the font to one of the shades, Horizontal or Diagonal. Set the font color for the Shade layer.

Variation

You can experiment with layering the Diagonal and Horizontal shades on top of each other. Or leave the Bevel weight out. Or drop the drop shadow.

Tips

Making editorial changes to Federal headlines can be drag if you do it layer by layer. Use the application's Find/Change function to change the old headline text into the corrected or new one. Select 'Change All' or do it step by step if you don't want all headlines changed.