Looking for font experts for a restoration question

[Fouga23]

Accurate fonts can be a REAL pain to find! I've had trouble with it as well. Anyone here who knows what font these reg numbers are?
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/forum/?q=fouga

It's all easy these days. Our AF uses Comic Sans for some aircraft! Makes me wanna puke!

[390BG]

Most B-17 interior placards use a Bernhard Gothic font. There are different flavours of this font available, the one we are using is Bernhard Gothic Heavy SG. Don't know if this is used on the bomb info placards or not - but you can find a sample of this font and see if it matches.

[ehokuf]

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106_104 by ehokuf, on Flickr

Here is a Drawing for a P-40 Placard. Curtiss called out the fonts on a majority of the placards.

Erik

[RMAllnutt]

One other way of duplicating fonts on placards is to simply place an original, representative placard on a flat bed scanner and make a scan. If the placard lays perfectly flat, you will get a perfectly proportioned representation of the placard. You then have several options for using the image. In Photoshop, you will have a super-accurate dimensional representation of the font, which you can then match up fonts against. Or you could even cut and paste the letters as you choose to create your new placard.

Alternatively, you can import the image into a cad package, and simply draw over it. Knowing the exact dimensions of the placard, you can then measure everything out correctly.

Cheers,
Richard

[RyanShort1]

One other way of duplicating fonts on placards is to simply place an original, representative placard on a flat bed scanner and make a scan. If the placard lays perfectly flat, you will get a perfectly proportioned representation of the placard. You then have several options for using the image. In Photoshop, you will have a super-accurate dimensional representation of the font, which you can then match up fonts against. Or you could even cut and paste the letters as you choose to create your new placard.

Alternatively, you can import the image into a cad package, and simply draw over it. Knowing the exact dimensions of the placard, you can then measure everything out correctly.

Cheers,
Richard

You can also make the font scalable by doing what's mentioned above, but importing into a vector-graphics program such as Inkscape that will allow you to "trace" the bitmap image (from the scan) into a vector! That's how I've done some model graphics for re-scaling.

Ryan