How we reconstructed the original Rosanne fonts, what we’ve discovered about their origins, and our ongoing search for their copyright holders.

In 1996, Amstrad introduced the PcW16, a rather unusual successor to its enormously successful PCW word-processing computers.

It was a dedicated writing machine with a graphical operating system called Rosanne, a mouse, windows, menus and a collection of typefaces intended to make producing documents as straightforward as possible.

Among those typefaces were Times, Times Bold and Swiss.

Thirty years later, those same fonts are appearing on this website.

Not approximations chosen from Google Fonts. Not modern replacements that happen to look similar. These are reconstructions made by asking Rosanne itself to render the original characters, recording the results and translating them into font formats that modern computers and web browsers understand.

Getting here has involved Z80 assembly language, operating-system research, emulator testing, Python programming, quite a bit of experimentation and an unexpected journey into the history of British software development.

It has also raised a question we haven’t yet been able to answer:

Who actually owns the rights to the original PcW16 typefaces?

This article explains what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned and why we’re sharing the preservation process while continuing to investigate the fonts’ origins.

Why preserve the fonts?

The PcW16 was not a general-purpose personal computer in the conventional sense.

Like the earlier PCW machines, it was designed primarily to help people write, edit and print documents. Its distinctive environment was central to that experience.

Rosanne’s windows, icons, menus and typography gave the computer its own character.

The typefaces were particularly important because they were not simply a decorative extra. They formed part of the machine’s word-processing capabilities. Each character had its own appearance, dimensions and spacing, all of which influenced how documents appeared on screen and on paper.

Preserving the operating system without preserving its typography would mean losing an important part of that experience.

And while surviving PcW16 owners can still use these fonts within Rosanne, they are not ordinary modern TrueType or OpenType files.

The originals were supplied in a proprietary format that contemporary operating systems do not normally understand.

For many years, this meant the fonts were effectively confined to the original machine or an emulator.

We wanted to change that.

The objective was not to modernise the typefaces or redraw them according to contemporary design preferences.

It was to preserve their original appearance as faithfully as possible and make it practical for people to recover the fonts from their own PcW16 installations.

An important distinction: reconstruction, not extraction

Before discussing the process, there is a distinction worth making.

We have not simply taken Amstrad’s original font files and converted them into TrueType.

The method we developed is different.

We wrote our own programs that run under Rosanne and ask the operating system to display its characters, using the same rendering facilities available to ordinary applications.

Our programs then read the rendered pixels and collect information about each character’s dimensions and spacing.

That data is transferred to a modern computer, where independently written Python tools reconstruct it into usable font files.

In other words, Rosanne remains responsible for drawing the original characters. Our tools observe and preserve what it produces.

This is not a claim that the results are entirely new typeface designs. They reproduce the appearance of existing typefaces and may therefore still engage rights in those designs.

But the distinction matters technically and historically: we are documenting the behaviour of the original system rather than distributing its proprietary font resources or directly repackaging their binary contents.

Understanding how Rosanne handles typefaces

Our work on the fonts grew out of a wider project to understand the internal workings of Rosanne.

Through PcW16ers, we have been investigating the operating system’s documented programming interfaces, memory management, graphics functions and application development capabilities.

The original developer documentation proved enormously useful.

Rosanne exposes typography-related operating-system functions that allow applications to select typefaces, display characters and obtain information about the way those characters are rendered.

Among the functions relevant to our investigation were:

os_typo_getlist — investigating the typefaces available to the system.
os_typo_select — selecting a typeface.
os_typo_def and os_typo_info — examining typography-related definitions and information.
os_typo_charscreen — rendering characters on screen.
os_typo_charinfo — obtaining character information.
bios_getpxl — reading the state of an individual screen pixel.

The availability of these interfaces was crucial.

Rather than attempting to reverse-engineer every detail of the original proprietary font-file format, we could let Rosanne do the rendering.

This gave us a route to recovering the actual character shapes and typography metrics exposed by the operating system.

FONTDUMP: a new Z80 utility

We developed a native Z80 assembly-language utility called FONTDUMP.

It runs as a Rosanne application and uses the system’s existing typography and graphics interfaces.

The fundamental process is straightforward, even if implementing it required considerably more effort:

Select an installed Rosanne typeface and point size.
Request the rendering of a character.
Read the pixels that Rosanne draws.
Record the resulting bitmap.
Obtain relevant character metrics from the operating system.
Save the captured information for subsequent processing.
Repeat for the remaining characters, sizes and typefaces.

The programs were assembled into executable .PRG files that could be run under Rosanne.

For development and testing we used XAnne, the Amstrad PcW16 emulator, running an original Rosanne environment.

This was useful because we could repeatedly run the same utilities, inspect their results, discover problems and refine the process without relying solely on physical hardware.

Importantly, XAnne is an emulator, not independent proof that every aspect of the original hardware behaves identically. We distinguish tested emulator behaviour from hardware behaviour that remains to be verified.

Recovering more than a character’s shape

Capturing a recognisable letter is only part of reconstructing a font.

Imagine recording the letter W. Its visual appearance matters, but so does the amount of horizontal space Rosanne allocates to it.

The same is true of i, punctuation, accented characters and the positioning of letters relative to the baseline.

A font that reproduces the shapes but ignores the original spacing can look quite different when used in a paragraph.

We therefore worked to preserve both the glyph bitmaps and the character metrics provided by Rosanne.

This includes information relevant to character advances, glyph dimensions and positioning.

An important technical complication is that the original character-width measurements are not simply the number of pixels visible on the screen. Rosanne exposes typography measurements in its own units, including width values expressed in 1/1800-inch units.

Our reconstruction tools must interpret those metrics appropriately when constructing modern font files.

The result is more than a folder of letter-shaped pictures. It is an attempt to recreate how the original typefaces behave when used to compose text.

Thirty original font instances

Our initial reconstruction concentrated on three supplied Rosanne faces:

Times Regular, Times Bold and Swiss Regular.

For each face, we captured ten point sizes:

6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18, 24, 36 and 72 points.

That gave us 30 separate face-and-size combinations.

Why capture so many sizes?

Because the original Rosanne fonts were not merely a single scalable outline automatically rendered at arbitrary sizes.

The supplied resources contained separate font instances for particular point sizes.

Small bitmap fonts often need deliberate pixel-level decisions to remain legible. A shape that works beautifully at 72 points may become an indistinct mess if mechanically reduced to six points.

Capturing each original size therefore preserves details that would otherwise disappear in a simple scaling process.

It also provides an unusually interesting record of how typography was optimised for a 1990s word processor.

Recovering the character set

The work went beyond the basic alphabet and numbers.

For each face-and-size combination, we captured the populated primary character range and investigated Rosanne’s additional character and accent handling.

Our completed capture work includes:

144 base character positions from 0x20 to 0xAF.
16 standalone accent positions from 0xD0 to 0xDF.
944 accent-and-base combinations per face and size.

These combinations allow us to preserve many accented characters and other forms needed for international text.

Not every position in the broader 8-bit range contains an ordinary font glyph. Some positions are unpopulated, while others are reserved for user-definable characters.

We documented those distinctions rather than inventing missing characters.

Across the three original faces and ten sizes, the process produced a substantial collection of character images and associated metrics.

This work eventually enabled us to generate modern font files with more than a thousand Unicode character mappings per face.

The font reconstruction is therefore considerably more comprehensive than a simple A–Z conversion.

From Rosanne pixels to modern TrueType

Once we had collected the original character data, the next stage was reconstruction on Linux.

We wrote Python tooling to interpret the captured results and generate modern font representations.

The first important output was BDF, or Bitmap Distribution Format.

BDF is particularly useful for preservation because it describes bitmap character shapes directly. It allows us to retain the original pixel-based appearance of each captured font instance.

But we also wanted fonts that could be used in contemporary software.

That meant generating TrueType files.

Why TrueType?

TrueType is widely supported by modern operating systems and applications.

It allows someone to install a font and use it in a word processor, graphics application or other software without needing to run Rosanne.

However, there is an important limitation.

Rosanne did not give us the original scalable outline drawings for these typefaces.

Our Python tools reconstruct outlines from the pixels we captured.

Consequently, the modern TrueType files are derived from the original rendered bitmaps, rather than recovered original vector fonts.

This means they preserve many distinctive features of the PcW16’s lettering, but they should not be described as identical to any original master outline that might once have existed.

For historical accuracy, the individual size-specific bitmap captures remain particularly valuable.

For practical modern use, the reconstructed TrueType fonts offer greater convenience.

Both have a place in preservation.

Bringing the typefaces to the web

We subsequently converted our reconstructed TrueType fonts into WOFF2, the compressed font format commonly used by modern web browsers.

Those files now allow PcW16ers to display text using typography reconstructed from Rosanne itself.

We currently have web-ready versions of Times Regular, Times Bold and Swiss Regular.

Times Bold was reconstructed from Rosanne’s own bold face. Where we require bold Swiss text on the website, the browser can synthesise the weight because we have not recovered a corresponding original Swiss Bold face as part of this collection.

The result is something I find rather lovely.

A computer designed primarily for word processing in the mid-1990s is now contributing its original visual character to a modern website about preserving that very machine.

Making the preservation process available to others

One of the most important outcomes of this work is that it does not have to remain a one-off experiment.

Other PcW16 owners may have installed different typefaces.

Additional fonts may have been distributed by third parties, developed privately or preserved on surviving machines.

We want to make it possible for owners to investigate and preserve those fonts too.

That is why we are preparing a separate open-source project:

PcW16 Typeface Preservation

The toolkit is intended to provide the native Rosanne utilities, assembly source code, Python conversion tools and instructions needed to reproduce the process.

The goal is to let an owner:

Discover the fonts available on their own PcW16.
Capture characters and measurements through Rosanne.
Transfer the resulting data to a Linux computer.
Reconstruct the captured fonts in modern formats.
Preserve the original font appearance and metrics for future study and personal use.

Our existing recovery process has been demonstrated with the three faces described above. General support for other installed fonts is a development goal and must be tested against those fonts rather than assumed.

The preservation toolkit will be released under the GNU General Public License version 3, with the precise licence designation documented in the repository.

The licence applies to our original toolkit code, subject to applicable third-party requirements. It does not grant rights over Amstrad software or automatically license the original designs of any fonts reconstructed with the tools.

Source code and instructions:

[PLACEHOLDER: LINK TO THE PUBLIC PCW16 TYPEFACE PRESERVATION GITHUB REPOSITORY]

We intend the public repository to distribute the tools and documentation, not original Rosanne font resources or captured proprietary glyph data.

This allows people to reproduce our work using the software and typefaces they already possess, while keeping the preservation tools themselves open for scrutiny, improvement and future development.

The other side of the story: who created these fonts?

Reconstructing the typography turned out to be only part of the investigation.

Once we had modern font files, a much less technical question emerged.

Who originally created the PcW16’s Times and Swiss typefaces, and who holds the rights to them today?

It would be convenient if we could point to a single confirmed company or designer.

Unfortunately, the surviving material does not yet let us do that.

But our research has revealed some intriguing historical leads.

The original Rosanne font files

We have examined surviving original Rosanne font resources associated with the PcW16.

These include font-family information and separate font files for the various supplied sizes.

The family resources use names such as:

FontFamily-Times.FNF
FontFamily-Swiss.FNF

The original font instances use the .WPF file format.

The original files show the way Rosanne organised its font families and individual sizes.

We have also identified internal markers associated with the Times and Swiss families, including Timz and Swiz.

However, these identifiers do not, by themselves, establish the creator or copyright holder.

We have not found an explicit rights notice within the examined font resources that conclusively names the designer, original foundry or owner.

This is a significant gap in the historical record.

Creative Technology and MicroDesign

One of our strongest leads concerns Creative Technology (MicroDesign) Ltd, the company associated with development of Rosanne.

The surviving Rosanne documentation identifies Creative Technology in connection with the operating system, and the original system credits name people involved with its development.

More importantly, we discovered a relevant passage in contemporary PcW16 questions-and-answers documentation preserved within the original rescue-disk material.

The document discusses the possibility of additional typefaces becoming available for the PcW16.

It explains that Creative Technology had designed fonts for earlier PCW products and suggests that some might be made available for the newer machine.

The same discussion refers to the supplied Times and Swiss fonts and describes the amount of storage required for their separate font files.

This is an important connection.

It establishes that Creative Technology had a history of producing typography for the Amstrad PCW family, and that its work was being discussed in relation to the PcW16’s font capabilities.

What it does not establish is whether Creative Technology created the particular Times and Swiss designs supplied with Rosanne.

There are several possibilities.

Creative Technology may have designed or adapted those typefaces itself.

It may have licensed them from an existing font supplier.

It may have produced original bitmap implementations inspired by established typographic designs.

Or different parties may have been responsible for the designs and their software implementation.

We have not yet found evidence strong enough to distinguish conclusively between these possibilities.

A connection with MicroDesign 3

Another interesting clue comes from the Rosanne developer documentation.

Its discussion of accents refers to those used in MD3, which we understand to mean MicroDesign 3, Creative Technology’s earlier desktop-publishing software for the Amstrad PCW range.

This suggests at least some continuity of typography-related conventions or implementation knowledge between the earlier MicroDesign products and Rosanne.

It makes Creative Technology and its earlier software particularly promising subjects for further historical investigation.

But again, a relationship between the systems is not proof of common ownership of their typeface designs.

For now, Creative Technology remains our strongest lead rather than a confirmed attribution.

Could the fonts have come from an established foundry?

The names Times and Swiss naturally raise other possibilities.

Times is associated with a long-established family of serif typography, while Swiss is a name widely used in connection with sans-serif typeface traditions.

Similar naming has appeared in commercial font libraries, including products associated with established digital font suppliers.

We have considered whether the PcW16 fonts may have been licensed or adapted from such a library.

However, a familiar font name is not sufficient evidence.

Two fonts might share a name without sharing exactly the same outlines, bitmap data, licensing history or original author.

Likewise, generic descriptions such as a Swiss-style sans-serif do not establish a connection to a particular foundry.

We would need contemporary licensing records, matching font data, developer testimony or other reliable evidence before attributing the PcW16’s font designs to a specific supplier.

At present, we cannot make that attribution responsibly.

A copyright notice that led somewhere else

While examining the original Rosanne rescue-disk image, we also discovered a notice naming:

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd and Proximity Technology, with a 1986 copyright date.

Initially, finding third-party names inside the system was exciting. It demonstrated that Rosanne included material acknowledging external rights holders.

But there is no evidence that this particular notice relates to the Times or Swiss fonts.

Those companies are more plausibly associated with language-related resources, such as spelling or dictionary technology.

This illustrates why historical research needs care.

A copyright notice somewhere in an operating-system distribution is not necessarily a copyright notice for every component contained within it.

We are preserving the finding, but we are not presenting it as evidence of font ownership.

What about Amstrad?

Amstrad commissioned and distributed the PcW16 and its operating system.

It is therefore another obvious part of the rights investigation.

However, a manufacturer distributing software does not necessarily own the underlying copyright in every component.

There could have been arrangements involving commissioned development, outright assignment, licensed software or licensed typeface designs.

The later corporate history of Amstrad does not resolve the question without knowing what rights Amstrad originally held.

We have not located an original agreement establishing whether the typeface designs or font software belonged to Amstrad, Creative Technology or another party.

We therefore do not consider any present-day company to be a confirmed successor rights holder for these particular fonts.

The copyright question

Our purpose at PcW16ers is historical preservation, education and development.

The project is non-commercial, and we are not attempting to market these fonts as newly designed commercial typefaces.

Nevertheless, we recognise that good intentions and non-commercial use do not automatically establish permission.

Recreating the visible appearance of a typeface can raise copyright questions even when the reconstruction software is entirely our own.

There may also be separate legal considerations relating to the original font programs, original designs, character data, names and modern reconstructed font files.

We have therefore been examining the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, particularly Sections 54 and 55.

The following explains our current understanding and the limits of that understanding. It is not a legal opinion or a declaration that every possible use of these files is authorised.

Section 54: using typefaces

Section 54 concerns the ordinary use of typefaces in activities such as composing text, typesetting and printing.

In broad terms, it provides an exception relating to copyright in the artistic work consisting of the design of a typeface when that typeface is used in the normal course of producing text.

This is relevant because the purpose of a typeface is, ultimately, to be used.

However, Section 54 also contains important qualifications concerning articles designed to reproduce a typeface and activities involving their distribution.

It would therefore be incorrect to interpret this section as a general permission to copy and redistribute any font file.

Our interest is in understanding how it applies to the ordinary use of reconstructed typography on this website and in documents, while recognising the distinction between using a typeface and distributing a font that reproduces it.

The official legislation can be read here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/54

Section 55: the 25-year provision

Section 55 is particularly interesting for historical computing projects.

It concerns copyright in the artistic design of a typeface where qualifying articles for producing material in that typeface have been marketed by, or with the licence of, the copyright owner.

It provides that, after 25 years from the end of the calendar year of first qualifying marketing, certain copying and activities relating to such articles may take place without infringing copyright in the artistic design of the typeface.

For a qualifying first marketing in 1996, the relevant 25-year period would have ended on 31 December 2021.

However, that calculation alone does not settle our position.

We need to establish the relevant qualifying marketing history, consider whether earlier marketed versions of the typeface are significant and determine how the provision applies to the particular reconstructed materials.

Most importantly, copyright in a typeface’s artistic design must be distinguished from any separate copyright subsisting in software or other original material.

The provision does not automatically establish that every font program made in 1996 became freely redistributable in 2022.

Our reconstruction method may be relevant to that distinction because we created new programs to record Rosanne’s rendered output rather than directly republishing its original font software.

But we do not treat the method as a guarantee of legal freedom.

The official legislation can be read here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/55

Our current approach

Based on our historical research and our reading of the relevant legislation, we believe there is a reasonable basis for continuing to investigate the preservation and use of these typefaces.

We have chosen to use reconstructed versions as part of the visual presentation of PcW16ers.

We are also making the independently developed reconstruction toolkit available as an open-source project, without distributing the original Rosanne font resources in that toolkit.

We are not claiming that uncertainty about ownership makes the fonts public domain.

Nor do we claim that the age of the software automatically removes all copyright restrictions.

We would prefer to resolve the uncertainty through historical evidence and, where possible, direct permission from the appropriate rights holder.

In particular, our ambition is eventually to obtain express permission to preserve and redistribute reconstructed copies of the typefaces themselves for the benefit of the wider retrocomputing community.

That is why this investigation remains open.

An open request for information and permission

If you worked at Amstrad, Creative Technology, MicroDesign or another company involved with the development or licensing of the PcW16’s typography, we would love to hear from you.

Likewise, if you represent a typeface foundry, software publisher or other organisation that may hold relevant rights, we would genuinely welcome a conversation.

We are particularly interested in discovering:

Who designed or adapted the Times and Swiss typefaces supplied with Rosanne.
Whether those designs were created specifically for the PcW16 or derived from earlier software.
Whether Creative Technology held the relevant rights or licensed the typefaces from another organisation.
Whether any original font master files, documentation or licensing agreements survive.
Whether rights in the font designs or software were subsequently transferred.
Whether permission can be granted for their continued use on PcW16ers and for non-commercial preservation and redistribution of the reconstructed fonts.

Our preference is to acknowledge the original creators properly and, if permission is required, secure it.

We have no wish to claim somebody else’s creative work as our own.

The reconstructed fonts are historically derived from Rosanne’s original typefaces. Our contribution lies in the investigation, capture programs, reconstruction techniques and preservation tools.

We want those distinctions to remain clear.

If you believe you own the rights

If you believe you hold copyright or other relevant rights in the typefaces described here, please contact us.

We will take any supported ownership claim seriously, review the information supplied and respond promptly.

We would welcome an opportunity to discuss permission for continued website use and the possibility of allowing the reconstructed fonts to be preserved and redistributed for historical, educational and non-commercial purposes.

If you object to their current appearance or availability on this website, please explain your concerns and the basis of your claim. We will review the position and take appropriate action, including removing affected font files where necessary.

Contact: [ADD PCW16ERS RIGHTS AND PRESERVATION CONTACT EMAIL OR CONTACT PAGE]

If you are not a rights holder but have historical information, documentation, old disks, font files, developer correspondence or personal recollections, please get in touch too.

Even a small piece of evidence might help resolve a thirty-year-old mystery.

What happens next?

There are several parts of this project that remain unfinished.

We want to test the preservation toolkit more widely, especially with fonts beyond the three original faces we have reconstructed.

We want to improve our knowledge of Rosanne’s font handling, including the relationships between typeface families, styles and individual bitmap sizes.

We also want to investigate any surviving alternative or additional typefaces that users may have installed during the machine’s original lifetime.

And we want to continue tracing the people and organisations responsible for Rosanne’s typography.

This is one of the reasons PcW16ers exists.

The community began in 1999 and has been revived to preserve, document and develop for a machine that might otherwise gradually disappear from living memory.

Much of that work is not commercially valuable.

It involves reading old manuals, investigating obscure system calls, recovering forgotten files, rebuilding development tools and sometimes spending a remarkable amount of time working out how a thirty-year-old computer draws a single letter.

But preserving computing history is about more than collecting old hardware.

It is about understanding how those machines worked, how they were used, what their creators achieved and what we can still learn from them.

The fonts are a perfect example.

They began as a small part of a proprietary word-processing system.

They have now led us into Z80 programming, digital typography, operating-system archaeology, software preservation and the history of British computer development.

And, most satisfyingly, we can use them again.

When you see Times or Swiss on PcW16ers, you are looking at lettering reconstructed from the output of Rosanne itself.

For me, that is a wonderful connection between the machine I remember and the project we are building today.

The technical preservation work has reached an exciting milestone. The historical investigation is still very much alive.

If you can help us discover who created these typefaces, or who may hold their rights today, we’d love to hear from you.

And if you still own an Amstrad PcW16, perhaps our preservation tools will help you save a little piece of its history too.

Project links and references

PcW16ers: https://pcw16ers.net/

PcW16 Typeface Preservation: [ADD GITHUB REPOSITORY LINK]

Preservation toolkit documentation: [ADD DOCUMENTATION LINK]

Rosanne technical research: [ADD RELEVANT PCW16ERS RESEARCH LINK]

Section 54, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/54

Section 55, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/55

Historical sources examined: Original Rosanne rescue-disk materials, surviving font resources, contemporary PcW16 questions-and-answers documentation, Rosanne developer documentation and relevant emulator source code. Detailed source references and technical findings will be added to the preservation project as they are verified.

This article documents ongoing historical and technical research. Our conclusions may be updated as new evidence, contributor information or legal clarification becomes available. We welcome corrections supported by contemporary sources.

Bringing the Amstrad PcW16’s Lost Typefaces Back to Life