Rage Italic™ is intended to be representative of a brushed stroke that is applied to a textured finish. This gives the outline of the strokes a rough appearance, as would be the case using archaic writing implements and materials such as a quill on parchment. This style of writing is a painstaking process and was devoid of the ability to easily remove any errors. There is also a tendency for the delicate quill tip to splay, or the brush to smudge if faster application of ink is attempted. Wetern peoples, unlike their oriental counterparts who used (and still do today) a brush to write with, were more likely to use a quill to write with and parchment or rough paper to write upon. The use of this technology, which dates back thousands of years, died out with the invention of the fountain pen in the early 19th century as the industrial revolution paved the way for the mass-manufacture of steel nibs. This ended the life of the quill pen and handwriting took on many different forms as the ability to write quickly was an immediate differentiating factor when it came to style. Modern handwriting is performed with a variety of pens and writing tools, most of which allow for a similarly rapid application of text to the page. This has led to a massive variation in handwriting styles, especially compared to the archaic handwriting of yesteryear.
The expense of parchment was another limitation back in ancient times but nevertheless, the human race has constantly sought to record information, so a great deal of knowledge was applied to parchment over the millennia. These efforts to record our knowledge date back from a least ancient Egypt of 5000 years ago, to the texts of monks in the dark ages only a few hundred years ago. Most parchments did not unfortunately last too long so we lost much of our knowledge to deterioration and age. Rage Italic is a modern improvisation of this style and has lots if uses where a quill-on-parchment effect is desirable.
The character set in Rage Italic is a little limited; the lower case set is cursive with a set of capitals that are intended for use only as capitalization for words as they do not sit together so well by themselves. A quirk of the capital set is that many of them are not rue capitals; instead there are many lower case letter forms that have just been scaled up in size to match the capital set.
This includes the letters a, m, n, g, y and z – the latter three of which have looped descenders which is more commonly seen on a lower case character set. This typeface is difficult to read in smaller sizes so it is advisable for use in sizes above 18 points and is not deemed suitable for body text.
Reference:
http://www.linotype.com/5750/rageitalic.html
