[pcherna]

Nice. I worked at Commodore and was responsible (ish) for the new Topaz for OS 2.0. We had been told to replace Topaz with a sans-serif font, and we replaced it with a font originally called "Clear" that was on one of the Fred Fish disks.

There was a big argument over the lower-case L. It has a rightward curl at the base even though it's sans-serif. This is widely seen now, but we had a lot of pushback at the time.

Topaz shipped in an 8-point and 9-point version. As I mentioned, we used Clear, maybe with a few mods (ampersand maybe), but that only existed in 8-point. I drew Topaz 9 sans-serif by starting with Topaz 9, and shaving off the serifs, and making minor tweaks.

[pcherna]

Hehe, thinking maybe the font we used was called "Clean", not "Clear".

[LocalH]

I went looking. The font "Clean" that's part of the NewFonts package on Fish disk 34 is pretty much identical to the font I've seen that was included in 1.4 prototypes. Kinda similar to a proportional font that shipped with DPaint IV if I'm not mistaken

[pcherna]

I think I'm blending two things then. I looked at a few old notes, and one of the devs replaced Topaz in Kickstart with what you see as the 1.4 font, as a way to kind of force the issue, since we hadn't really done any work to make or obtain a sans-serif font. Nobody wanted that font, which turned up the pressure.

I guess in addition to shaving the serifs off Topaz 9, I also did Topaz 8. And "Clean" was the source of the interim font, not of new Topaz. Memories fade, and thanks for the extra info.