If you were as hopelessly sheltered as yours truly was, maybe you didn’t know car plates could be forged. (I got in trouble for reading in class. okay.)

Don’t do this, kids.

Like all things crime, there’s an art to subverting the law, and there’s a range of quality. On one hand, you’ve got the folks applying mud or duct tape to their cars and wanting to sneak across the border for one more six-pack. On the other hand are the organized terrorists who want to make their tracks just a little bit harder to spot. Forgeries aren’t all stacks of money, white collar criminals, and Matt Bomer.

white collar crime in progress

Back in the 70's, Germany was the first country to wise up to license plate forgeries after violent trouble from the Red Army Faction, and decided they were going to crack down. Being the people that invented the printing press, they did so with their delectable typeface expertise.

(I should point out the people that did all of this research were the folks at the University of Giessen (Dept. of Physiology and Cybernetic Psychology). It makes you wonder what they’re working on now, with that hella rad name.)

Now, for successful car plate forgery, you (supposedly) want to change one set of numbers for another, like so:

“A demonstration of attempted alteration of characters set in the FE-Schrift typeface. The series “PBF” (top row) is modified to read “R3E” (middle row, in red). The correct appearance of the series “R3E” is shown in the bottom row.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Bonus points if you’re applying the least paint and effort possible; extra gold star if you’re applying only the black paint.

Why black paint? white paint shows up horribly on car plates, since acrylics aren’t reflective like the retroreflective metal used. (Long story; it involves Weird and Vague Science Diagrams and Big Words that are frankly terrifying enough without being in the classroom.)

sorta like this

The Germans turned to a font called FE-Schrift, (Fälschungserschwerende Schrift aka forgery-impeding typeface) that makes it impossible to paint over. FE-Schrift was so successful it is still used there after being adopted in the 80's. Cuba, Chile, South Africa, and a whole host of other African and European countries also use it today.

FE-Schrift: Check out the tail of the Q and the smaller crossbar of the I — Helvetica, it ain’t.

However, making the plates harder to forge was only half the battle; they also wanted the darn things to be easier to spot. More specifically, easier to spot for machines, as the further away the radar could spot the plates, the more bad guys they could catch.

What’s the one kind of font that machines absolutely adore?

Monospaced Fonts

monospace in a nutshell.

In brief, Monospaced fonts is where each letter has the exact same space horizontally as all the others. While kerned fonts read better in general, Monospaced fonts were useful in many instances.

Their history starts with typewriters. Maybe you’ve wondered why all of the typed documents in Inglorious Basterds (and any WW2 film) look like they’re typed with Courier, and not Helvetica or Open Sans — this is why. According to Wikipedia, it has something to do with the typewriter’s striker arms not being able to shift around to accommodate for those pesky i’s or m’s. I think.

Monospaced fonts were insanely useful for early computers as well. It was much easier for computers to not waste spare processing power for silly things like kerning, when the storage of the machine was 1MB, max. It’s tenacious enough that you’ll see Monospaced fonts in generic programs like Notepad, TextEdit, Terminal, and just about anywhere where you see proper code.

(Engineers, gotta love them.)

These days, they’re still used in science for writing molecules, in music, and in of all things, screenplays. 12pt Courier to be exact. Supposedly, with the even spaces of the letters, one screenplay page will take one minute of screen-time on average, though no one’s actually tested this yet.

Something something forgeries …

FE-Schrift, despite its spiffy machine-visible and forgery-smashing capabilities, still isn’t used in the US and quite a few countries. I’m not really sure why, as US vanity plates are screwed up as far as design goes, so here’s hoping that someone will take heed of sensible design across the ocean.

Fonts: fighting crime and making the world a prettier place at the same time.