The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Font

Copyright (c) 2003 by John Stracke

My other fonts

Not a very impressive piece of work, but fun. I sat down to fiddle with pfaedit (now called FontForge), and started seeing what I could do freehand, with minimal splines. The result was all rounded (not surprising), sort of marshmallowy, and I started thinking of it as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Font (see Ghostbusters if you don't get it). Once I had a name, I felt compelled to round out the font (ISO 8859-1, at least). The outcome looks sort of like Comic Sans MS. It's kind of cute, and might be good for frivolous stuff such as birthday cards. I've used it on my National Academy of Silly Walks merchandise.

It is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), or, at your option, the SIL Open Font License. Where the LGPL refers to "source code", I take that to refer to the file called StayPuft.sfd, which is a file for editing with pfaedit, an outline font editor program. Thus, according to the LGPL, if you distribute this font, you must make StayPuft.sfd available to the recipient(s) under the terms the LGPL specifies for source availability. Each of the download links below is an archive (tarfile or zipfile) which includes StayPuft.sfd, the LGPL, a readme, and at least one font file (e.g., Isabella.ttf for TrueType files). I chose the LGPL instead of the GPL because, arguably, using the GPL might mean that PostScript and PDF files with this font embedded would be GPLed (they're like programs that link to a static library).

FontForge is not GPLed, but its license does seem to count as free software (it's BSD-style, without the advertising clause).

The font has ASCII, Latin-1, and a few other useful characters: left and right quotation marks (single and double), ellipsis, long dash, and Euro. I don't intend to round it out as much as I did with Isabella; this is a much less interesting project. Anyone who wants to donate extra letterforms is welcome, of course.

Sample text

PDF, PNG

Downloads

(I no longer create Linux packages for my fonts, because there's an easier way: create a .fonts directory in your home directory, and put the OpenType file there.)