The Hungarian punchcutter Miklós Kis designed and cut this typeface in about 1685 while working in Amsterdam. It was not cut by Anton Janson, a Dutch punchcutter who worked in Leipzig in the seventeenth century. For many years this typeface was wrongly attributed to Janson, and the font still erroneously bears his name. Some of the Kis punches and matrices made their way to D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt in 1919. Linotype Janson was cut in 1954 under the supervision of Hermann Zapf, and was based on the original Kis punches. Prof. Horst Heiderhoff led the Linotype Design Studio in the most recent expansion of Janson in 1985.
Now a versatile family of eight weights, this version of Janson Text is the most authentic digital version of the Kis types. With its legible, sturdy forms and strong stroke contrast, Janson Text™ has proved very successful for book and magazine text, and it continues to appear in the ranks of bestselling types.
