Lexicon Font

Lexicon is Bram de Does’s text family from The Enschedé Font Foundry. The publisher describes its development for economical small-size settings such as dictionaries and reference works. Its history includes early use in Van Dale, while the family’s design and release stages should not be collapsed into a retailer listing date.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

The publisher distinguishes No.1 with shorter extenders from No.2 with normal extenders, while maintaining shared widths. Each group includes upright and italic weights. This is a purposeful solution for compact typography; it does not mean that any unrelated serif can be substituted without changing line breaks.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Compare a dense reference paragraph, a dictionary-style entry and a footnote. Judge line spacing alongside the ascenders and descenders. Keep the exact group and weight in your specification, and distinguish the separate Lexicon Headline product from the text resources discussed here.

For independent comparisons, try Source Serif 4 and EB Garamond. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use The Enschedé Font Foundry to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Lexicon font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.