18839216
Published: 5th June, 2008
Last edited: 21st April, 2010
Created: 5th June, 2008
The original Morse code was created for Samuel F.B. Morse's electric telegraph in the early 1840s, but spread to radio communications (and beyond) beginning in the 1890s. (It is now known as American Morse code, and rarely used.) International Morse code was created by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848, and standardized at the International Telegraphy congress (Paris) in 1865.
Other current Morse Code FontStructions have encountered word- and letter-spacing issues, and I tried to work around this by stacking the dots and dashes vertically. The result reminds me a bit of Mayan numerals, but hey, as long as it still reads as Morse... I wonder what the ITU would say about this? One thing's for sure... it saves a lot of horizontal space.
In each character, the dots and dashes read from top to bottom rather than from left to right. Punctuation has the longest series of dots and dashes in International Morse Code (six), so this number determined my cap height. :-) The shorter characters all hang from this imaginary line.
Missing characters: Please note that the !, & and $ symbols are not defined within the ITU recommendations for International Morse code, so they are not part of this typeface. On the other hand, the @ symbol was approved for use in 2004, so I've also included the underscore sign I found at two different online sources. (The underscore symbol has not been formally approved by the ITU, but it could come in handy if you have to transmit an e-mail address using Morse code!)
Other characters: As with my two Braille FontStructions, the uppercase and lowercase versions of each character are the same. Also, the opening and closing parentheses share the same symbol, which will also show up if you type brackets instead of parentheses. Last but not least, there are a very few diacritics included (the ones I was able to verify).
