Bitstream's typeface professionals selected 12 designs to provide a comprehensive collection of fonts for viewing on TV screens. Included are three families: Bitstream Oranda, a serif font family; Letter Gothic 12 point, a monospaced font family; and Zurich, a sans serif font family.

In addition to the fonts in the TV Font Pack, Bitstream also offers the Tiresias Screenfont for licensing. The DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) has adopted the Tiresias Screenfont as the standard font for the MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), which many set-top box and digital TV manufacturers are using as their standard development platform.

TV Font Pack Spec Sheet (pdf)

Bitstream Oranda was designed by Gerard Unger in 1986. With the BBC, he has cooperated on the development of grayscale fonts (anti-aliasing) for television. Oranda is a strong, legible typeface that, like Letter Gothic, does not take up a lot of horizontal space on screen.

Letter Gothic is a rarity, a sans serif face designed for the typewriter. Created by IBM in 1956, it is cleaner in appearance than serif typewriter faces and many other monospaced fonts.

Letter Gothic is a perfect monospaced font for the screen, because it does not take up a lot of real estate: you can put more characters on a horizontal line of text than you can with other monospaced fonts.

History

ZurichTV is Bitstream's version of Univers, a 21-weight typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1956. Similar to but more interesting than Helvetica, ZurichTV is great for crisp, clear text. It works very well on the screen and is very readable.