Talk to any older typographer and you’ll see that he has a special relationship to his Linotype machine. The movie “Linotype”, coming soon, will maybe help you to understand these old typographers.

HandpaintedType is a project that is dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of street painters around India. These painters, with the advent of local DTP (Desktop Publishers) shops, are rapidly going out of business with many of them switching to the quicker, cheaper but uglier vinyls. Many painters have given up their practice altogether. The project involves documenting the typefaces of road side painters across India and digitizing it so that it serves as a resource for present and future generations. HandpaintedType is a collaborative project. If you’d like to contribute or collaborate, please get in touch.

Monotype Imaging Holdings is set to acquire the font business of rival Bitstream in a $50m (£32m) all cash deal that will leave Bitstream to focus on its Pageflex print automation tool and other software businesses.

You can read the article on PrintWeek.

A good opportunity to get some exposure, let your creativity explode, and eventually win a prize. If you are a talented designer and have some time on your hands, you should give a try to this contest.

If you like both robots and typography, you’ll be pleased with this bible-writing robot created by the fine people of robotlab in Zürich.

Georgia and Verdana had two things in common so far: they were designed by Matthew Carter and meant to be optimized for on-screen use. Now they have another thing in common, they each get a pro version.

The pro versions add many features like new weights, numerals, small caps and more.

If you are interested in getting those fonts, you can buy them on Fonts.com: Georgia Pro – Verdana Pro.

The International Printing Museum launched a Kickstarter project to save a collection of approximately 100 full fonts of antique Ludlow Typecasting matrices, catalog & organize the fonts into our working collection & digitize Ludlow Type Specimen books with notes on available fonts for letterpress projects.

Immediate bookmark for this very useful tool, find categorized special characters, copy it with one click and paste it wherever you need.

10 years in type is an anniversary publicationby Fontsmith. It gives you an insight into the creative processes in that type foundry.

Android 4.0 “Ice-cream Sandwich” is out, officially launched with a new look and tons of new features. Engadget has a post that let you know more about all these new features. It’s a great day for Google and all Android fanboys, except…

Except the accusations of thievery that have been thrown at Google’s face. First, they have been accused of stealing many functionalities or user interface features from iOS, WebOS or Windows Phone. Second, the point that will interest the typographers more, it seems that their new exclusive font, Roboto, is not that exclusive after all.

Side-by-side comparison of Roboto and Helvetica created by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

Stephen Coles argues that Roboto is a mashup of four fonts: Helvetica, Myriad, Univers, FF Din and Ronnia. In another article, Michael Degusta of The Understatement tells us that the fonts is only a rip-off of Helvetica. He demonstrates it with an animated gif that overlaps the two fonts, and you have to admit that the result is quite disturbing.

I guess we can safely say that Roboto is Google’s Arial. Too bad, I really like the Android project overall, but this should be fixed. It will be interesting to see what happens if a lawsuit is filed against Google.

If you want to check out Roboto anyway and test it out, you can do it here.