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Help identifying an OLD font?
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Nominal Animal:
I use Inkscape exclusively for this kind of work.  If you don't already have it installed, you're depriving yourself of an excellent free tool.  (Said by someone who really loved Freehand before Macromedia was sold to Adobe, although Illustrator was almost as good.  You young whippersnappers probably have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Put the image of the old dial to a locked bottom layer, then draw and finesse the details as vectors.  There's all kinds of tools to help make the dial lines et cetera.  Best possible fidelity for the printout, and it is easy to compare the original and the new one.  You can even pick an "almost" correct font, type the numbers, convert them to paths, and adjust them as needed.

If the dial image was not missing 5 and 6 (although it is likely 6 is close to a rotated 9), I'd have whipped up a basic dial for you already; it's a really quick way to work with restoration/replacement/adjusting a dial face.
helius:

--- Quote from: Twoflower on June 06, 2020, 11:01:06 am ---Maybe that helps to search a bit further. The font on this gauge looks very similar: BRASS PRESSURE GAUGE - 1930'S (link to a shop).
--- End quote ---

Wow, I have no idea how you found this. The photos are close to straight-on and would be easy to trace.
You can use Illustrator CS or later's autotrace tool to turn figures like this into line art automatically. My preference is actually for the older Adobe Streamline, which has more options and is very fast. As line art, it can be scaled, stretched, or rotated as needed.
Nominal Animal:
Here's as far as I got until I got bored.  It's a zipped Inkscape SVG file, with one of the pressure gauge images embedded on a background layer, with the dial face features (except the digits!) on a text layer, and the gradations on a separate layer.

Reason I got bored was that I don't have any of the close matches fonts installed, and am too lazy Saturday to install one right now.  It's easier to find a close match, make it semi-transparent, and tweak to match the image.

Maybe it helps, maybe not, but here it is!  :popcorn: 
amyk:
I already tried making a font in my previous post; looks like the 5 is almost the same without the serif at the top, but that should be easy to fix. :)
bsdphk:
I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that the scale was made with a font.

A sign-painter painted the master for the silk-screening, and the numerals shape is one of his "usual strokes".

Your best bet for finding something similar, is therefore to study photos of shop windows near (time&space) the place of manufacture, or maybe more accessible, books about historical sign-painting.



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