Trench Sans

Trench Sans is family of fonts intended for use in small-sized texts – about 5–10pt.

In spirit, Trench Sans is an agate type. An agate is a a unit of typographical measure, 5.5 points high. Like many other agate types, Trench Sans features ink-traps as part of its design. These are little wells in corners where ink would otherwise clog-up and make the printing appear too dark.

Other functional aspects for high performance in small sizes, which have been added to Trench Sans, include compact letter shapes, open counters, appropriate spacing, and short descenders to better accommodate for tighter text-setting.

There are a number of alternates included in each font: the standard form of the capital “I” in all fonts has serifs; the “a” is two-storied and the “g” is single-storied. Over stylistic sets, users can access a capital “I” without serifs, a double-storied “g”, and alternate forms of “M”, “N”, “W”, and “w”.

Trench Sans is part of ITF’s Trench superfamily, which also includes Trench Rounded and Trench Slab.