It has been a long tradition for foundries to produce type specimens. Printed specimens worked as a means of evaluating metal founts, a commodity otherwise very heavy and hard to test. Digital fonts have been previewed by means of printed specimens and online by means of PDF specimens, various slideshow carousels and online testers.
However, all these solutions are cumbersome replacements for a proper test-drive which should be taken before making a substantial investment, that is, buying a license and adopting a certain typeface for a project.
Recognising this, some foundries (often quietly) provided short-term temporary testing licenses, usually based on a signed agreement. This solution creates unnecessary legal burden on both sides – that is why a few years back, software vendors and larger type foundries introduced plugins for common DTP software. Unfortunately, these plugins are often cumbersome and by definition tied to specific applications. A more developed alternative to this seems to be font renting services by Monotype (SkyFonts) and Adobe (Typekit Desktop Font Syncing). These seem to provide much better service, but again, remain tied to specific applications which need to be installed for the fonts to work and, together with the plugins, sideline fonts from smaller, independent foundries. It seems that all these solutions are great tools to test fonts, but they also show a significant distrust of the users – and an obsessive need for control.
We are an independent foundry and we wish to stay in direct contact with our users. And we have one advantage over the larger companies – we know and we trust our users! That is why we have decided to take a rather bold step (at least it may seem like one) and offer some of our fonts for testing purposes for a small fee. We call them TEST fonts.
As of today, you can download Eskorte Latin TEST fonts for 6 EUR each. That is roughly 8 dollars and about one-tenth of the usual price. The fonts are fully functional OpenType fonts stripped off all typographic extras and and can only be used for evaluation purposes and to create mockups.
We hope you will like this option and we will be able to slowly extend this offer from individual families to all of Rosetta’s fonts. You do not have to just look anymore, you can go and try the fonts in your design, in an application of your liking.
For up to three months after you have purchased the TEST fonts we will discount their value when you upgrade to a proper desktop license, so you do not have to pay anything extra.
Update: these conditions are now deprecated, please refer to the description in the Help and Licence sections on this web.
