Decorative Fonts

We have five decorative fonts: PM Ornamental, EFI Copperplate and EFI Copperplate Bold, EFI Extra Fancy, and EFI Manuscript Calligraphic. PM Ornamental and the EFI Copperplate fonts are cursive fonts, and each comes with a program to correctly link the cursive letters.

PM Ornamental has fancy capital letters. The lower case letters and other characters have a more elegant weight than those characters in the PM Cursive font. The capital letters do not connect to lower case letters.

Our version of Copperplate was based on the examples given in the excellent book, "The Art of Calligraphy", by David Harris. He describes Copperplate: "This elegant script is probably the most cursive of all hands. Most letters can be written with one stroke and there are few pen lifts between letters." and "In 1594, an instruction manual for Italic script was printed from text that had been engraved on sheets of copper with a pointed tool known as a burin.", and "The principal innovation of the Copperplate was that, for the first time, all letters in a word were linked, making it a fast and practical hand to write."

Truly gorgeous, use EFI Copperplate on fancy paper, instead of a burin on sheets of copper, to achieve a very nice certificate or formal invitation.

We have two variations of our Copperplate font, EFI Copperplate and EFI Copperplate Bold. Both are shown in the sample below.

EFI Manuscript Calligraphic is a fairly straightforward, simple calligraphic font that was based on the 6th grade curriculum book from Bob Jones University©, with which EFI is not associated. It is intended to give 6th graders something fun to do. Looks pretty nice on its own, though, so we included it for you.

EFI Extra Fancy is based on an antique font called Balmoral, probably used in invitations to attend upon the English monarchs at their Balmoral residence.

Extra Fancy is very suitable for certificates and awards, or extra special projects. Its curly shapes with varying widths is a far cry from modern handwriting fonts, since to make Extra Fancy by hand you would need a split tip (calligrapher's) pen rather than a ballpoint pen, pencil, or Crayon.

Extra Fancy is also unusual in that it connects naturally, without the need for running a LinkLetter program. Just type out what you want, and it connects. Extra Fancy does not have International characters (an o with an umlaut, for example), nor some of the special symbols normally on a keyboard (>, @, +, =, etc.), since they would not be used for formal invitations.


For better samples, you can download the file EFI_decorative_fonts.pdf and print it on your computer. Downloading this file does not install the fonts on your computer. To open the file, use Adobe Acrobat Reader, version 3.0 or higher. You can obtain Adobe Acrobat Reader from the Adobe web site, http://www.adobe.com.

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