Engraved Door Knocker Font Choice

Your engraved door knocker is greatly affected by your choice of fonts.
The choice of the engraving font for your engraved door knocker is not always an easy one. Script and ornamental fonts may look pretty but are hard to read. Roman, Helvetica or other so called block fonts are easy to read but perhaps a bit plain.

Many modern engraving systems are computer driven. These have the ability to use the thousands of tru-type fonts used by the computer. While this offers a huge selection, these fonts also have holdbacks. They are designed for desktop publishing, not engraving.

Fonts designed for engraving offer the best proportions and fills for the process. They have been designed to be engraved, not printed. This makes a big difference on the finished product. A professional engraver will have a library of engraving fonts that includes selections of script, Helvetica, Roman and perhaps a few ornamental fonts.

Fonts used by Your-Door-Knocker are shown on this page Engraving Fonts

A door knocker will generally have a limited amount of space for engraving. Depending on the height to width limitations your choice of font may be limited. There is more to your choice of fonts for your engraved door knocker than meets the eye. Your choice of font, font size, and case has a direct bearing on how large the letters can be.

Before deciding the font size for your engraved door knocker, lets take a trip in the way back machine to somewhere around first grade. We are trying to duplicate those block letters pictured over the black board on our properly ruled pads. ... Well OK I may be older than you but you get the idea ... Anyway, lets look at the word "Anyway". The capital A is an ascender because it goes above the mid line and the y is a descender because it goes below the base line.

Why is this important in the engraving of my door knocker and the font size? It goes back to that limited space thing.

Many door knockers are similar to the urn shape pictured on the left side of the page. Notice that the engraving area where a name would normally go is a rectangle of limited height.

If the word - Anyway - was being engraved in mixed case the letters would have to be smaller to allow room for the "y" to hang down. The overall engraving would need to be sized to allow room from the bottom of the "y" to the top of the "A" so the actual font size would be about 1/2 the height of the engraving area.

The picture shown compares the popular Times Roman font upper case and mixed case of the same size. On the bottom line is a mixed case example the size it would need to be to fit in the same area as the upper case example.

Now, if the engraving was done in all upper case - ANYWAY - each letter could be almost the same height as the engraving area because there is no descender to allow for.

Fonts for an engraved door knocker come in different weights, or boldness. The bolder the font the more lines are used to form each letter. You will encounter font descriptions as 1 line, 2 line, 3 line and up.

A 1 line letter is formed by a single line or pass of the engraver and is very thin. This is great when putting a lot of small letters on a plate but for an engraved door knocker the engraving would be practically invisible so they should never be used.

In 2 line fonts each letter is outlined and hollow. This works well in many cases on an engraved door knocker. If your engraver is using tru-type fonts they would engrave as 2 line.

In 3 or more line fonts the letter is outlined but another or more lines fill each letter making them more visible. 3 or 4 line fonts are a preference for door knockers.

Also see Engraved Door Knocker and Engraved Door Knocker Message.