The Fall online - The MES Handwriting Font

the MES handwriting font updated 24 October 2007

Paul Wilson, typographer to the stars, has pieced together the excellent but rather spooky Mark E Smith font:

Download the True Type font for PCs here (self-extracting .exe file)

Download the Mac version here (also self-extracting)

HPAK sample

To install the PC version, double-click mesttf.exe to extract the files somewhere temporary. Then go to Control Panel, Fonts, and Install Fonts... from the File menu. Navigate to the right directory and click okay. It's then ready to use! We've had a few problems getting Word 97 to recognise the font correctly, but everything else we've tried it on works okay.

It seeems to be that Word 95/97 doesn't recognise the font straight away, and substitutes the default. I think this can be fixed by:
In a new Word document, type in a bit of text in the MES font (which will show up in e.g. Times Roman).
Go to Tools, Options, Compatibility, Font Substitution. Instead of it converting to "Default", change this to "Mark E Smith". This has worked for me anyway - let me know if it doesn't.

Instructions for downloading font on a Mac: once downloaded, the file should have extracted itself with Stuffit expander and a .suit (suitcase) file should have appeared. Take this file and drop it in the System Folder. A notice should appear saying something like: 'Fonts should be stored in the Fonts folder to be available to this Macintosh'. You're asked to confirm this action. All software should be closed when you're doing this as you can only see the font when you've opened a particular piece of software from scratch. And that's it.