Norma Font

Norma is a fantasy dot matrix font base on DIN 6776 lettering for technical drawing (also known as TGL 31034 in the former East Germany, which is in fact the reference for this font). “Fantasy” dot matrix because no printer using this font ever existed.

The Cap-height is 10 dots, which meets the DIN standard requirement for stroke thickness to be 1/10th of the Cap-height; the x-height is 70% of that at 7 dots.

Descenders match ascenders and are 3 units; giving a 13 unit high body. Capitals with diacritics, the german umlaut, use an additional 3 units above the Cap-height.

The underlying design is a sans serif with monoline stroke and a squarish O. The standard style is slightly condensed.

Repertoire: i added all the glyphs from the existing specimen sheet for the TGL 31034 standard, which has the ASCII Latin alphabet and the umlauts and ß required for German. No other languages are explicitly covered (but some may be added in the future).

The TGL 31034 standard has roman numerals, so they are available as pre-built Unicodes. As an added bonus Dozenal Numbers (base 12) are supported with Turned Two and Turned Three.

The punctuation displayed in the TGL specimen is fairly limited, i have added a small number of extra punctuations and symbols.

Quotation marks as shown in the source images are low double quotes (Unicode U+201E) DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK and regular RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK. The low marks are clearly drawn below the baseline; this is unusual for modern designs, but i have kept it. I've also added LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK as a clone of the RIGHT (if you like, you can think of them as rotated, because the actual drawing is just simple stroke).

In December 2025 as part of my Advent of Type project, i added smallcaps to Norma. I have now finished kerning those and incorporated them into the main release of this font.