hOwdy font guide
hOwdy font guide

Glyphs

hOwdy includes 100 glyphs covering most of the letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols found on a standard qwerty keyboard, and a few more accessed using Alt. The only exception is “broken bar”.

The font is mono-spaced—all characters are the same width—and includes a space and a non-breaking space.

Letters

Numerals

Punctuation

Symbols

Demo

You can test the font in this textbox:

Home

hOwdy is a typeface of dingbat/decorative fonts made of weird faces I created using toilet rolls and a copy of GIMP. That's about it.

Fonts

There are 4 fonts, divided along 2 axes:

  • Rough vs Smooth (how much detail the glyphs have)
  • Regular vs Irregular (whether or not the faces are the same height)

The typeface includes each combination: Rough-Irregular, Rough-Regular, Smooth-Irregular, and Smooth-Regular. This guide uses Smooth-Irregular for all demos.

Using dingbats right

Try any of the following options to avoid confusion for people who use TTS software:

  • use it in a separate text frame or object and convert it to curves (e.g. using Affinity Publisher's “Convert to curves” function)
  • use it in a text frame and mark it as a decorative text frame (this can be done in MS Word)
  • use it in a raster/pixel-based image editor, export the image from that app, and import it into your main text

Download

This font is available free at itch.io:

License

hOwdy is available under the SIL OFL-1.1. That means, among other things, you can freely use it in both personal and commercial projects without paying royalties, and can modify the font files as long as certain conditions are met.