WHEN Spike Gjerde started to build a new restaurant in an old mill in Baltimore, he did not want a slick menu with crisp, perfect letters. “We’re all totally about salvage and reuse,” he said. The menu had to reflect the restaurant’s goal: presenting local ingredients in a rough-hewn complex that once cast the 36-inch-wide columns that support the dome of the United States Capitol.

So he turned to Mary Mashburn, a designer with an office filled with old type just a few blocks away. Ms. Mashburn set the restaurant’s name, Woodberry Kitchen, with scratched and nicked wooden type from her collection of antique block types and then printed a copy on her old letterpress. She then scanned the result into her computer, where she tweaked a few letters and adjusted some spacing. A new version of an old font was born.

“The fact that the letters were distressed, it was real,” Mr. Gjerde said.

Before the personal computer, most people were oblivious to fonts. Some may have recognized Courier and Elite on the I.B.M. Selectric typewriter ball. Then word processing programs offered a hundred or more fonts, from Arial to Wingdings. More were offered in software packages and on the Internet. Now, many people can recognize fonts by name. Indeed, a documentary about typography and one of the most familiar typefaces, “Helvetica,” played to sellout crowds at film festivals.

People like Mr. Gjerde are realizing that the thousands of fonts available on the Internet are not enough anymore. They can build custom fonts in which the letters are not perfect duplicates of one another. They can mix in other fonts and produce something that is uniquely suited for the job.