The Promenade Blog » Blog Archive » Zodiac Killer Font, Pt. I

Zodiac Killer Font, Pt. I

August 31, 2007 4:40 am Phil Strahl donationware, fonts

I was busy reading “Zodiac” by Robert Graysmith the last week and I am about finishing the book. It’s a very good read and I recommend it, especially when you’re into details in the investigations or details in general. And while looking through Zodiac’s letter and cyphers I felt somehow the urge to make a TrueType font of Zodiac’s handwriting. So here it is.
EDIT: Renamed the Font from Zodiac Cipher ‘69 to Zipher. Sounds slicker and orders alphabetically nicely with all the other Zodiac Killer Fonts I’ve created so far (or will in the future).

Zipher TrueType font

Perhaps you are interested also in other fonts of the Zodiac Killer font series:

Zipher for the ciphers
Zanity for neat handprint
Zodiac, the Original Zodiac

It wasn’t as easy as anticipated but still I managed to transport Zodiac’s thorough way of writing into the font which contains all symbol used by Zodiac in his letter to Toschi on November 8, 1969. If you click the image you’ll see the mapping of the keys which is optimized for English/American keyboard layouts.

EDIT: The very generous and very meticulous Mr. Richard Smith infrormed me of a missing character: The P with the filled counter in row 5, column 14 as well as in row 12, column 15 I mistook for a badly reproduced generic P when making the font and thus omitting it. It’s now mapped to the semicolon (;) so you won’t have to look very far away from your P key on your keyboard. In addition I cleaned all the outlines and adjusted some other details resulting in a better font with a smaller file-size.

See this chart for reference on the symbols.

Usage of the Zodiac Cipher Font

When typing lower case you mostly get the normal letters (except for the Q), when typing upper case you’ll get the alternative version of the letter, e.g. a backwards R or an upside down T. If you’re looking for the flag symbols use the numerals, also with caps for different symbols.

You’ll get the small Zodiac logo by typing Z
The big Zodiac logo which he used as signature is the &
Type ! for the solid circle.
The single time when Zodiac corrected one symbol (row 6, column 12) can also be reproduced hitting ]
EDIT: The P with the filled counter can by reached via the semicolon.