All of the alphabetical characters and numbers in Boxcar™ were scanned from photographs of actual stencil lettering painted onto the side of Canadian railcars.

ALTERNATE CHARACTER SETS
The Boxcar™ fonts do not have true lowercase character set, but have an alternate set of uppercase characters in the lowercase character slots. In general, the lowercase versions of the letters are lighter in weight and have slightly less width.

LETTERS OF A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT STYLE
An interesting note is that a few of the letters do not exactly match the stencil style of the rest of their family members. These slight variations in character style were actually found mixed in with other text sprayed onto the real boxcars. Just like on older movie theatre signs with moveable plastic letters, we have all seen substituted letters used which are in a different type style or colour (due to letters which have either been lost over time or were lacking enough duplicates of a particular letter). The stencils on the boxcars also displayed this characteristic and is we captured that in this font family to allow you to carry on the realism of the effect. Where such an alternate character exists, you will find a version of that character (in either the upper of lowercase set) which is more akin to the type style of the other letters.

DELIBERATE KERNING FLAWS
Because Boxcar™ was created to simulate letters hand-stenciled onto surfaces using spraypaint, it was important to maintain a certain amount of slight kerning imperfection. When designing the font, we carefully went through all the normal character combinations looking for places to add kerning pairs and actually had to fight to NOT add kerning in some spots just to maintain that natural flawed look.

ENHANCING REALISM
If you really want your Boxcar™ to look convincing, you might want to actually set the text in a program such as Adobe Photoshop and blend the type with the scanned photograph of the surface you are planning to set it on. Before you deselect the text, you might want to put scratches through it, or decolour the tops of bottoms of each line of type with a reddish-brown colour resembling rust. Rather than actually colouring the type with a solid colour, using the above method, you might simply lighten the background of your photograph using the type outlines as the selected region, which will allow the actual characteristics of the background to show through onto the apparent colouration of the text.

FULL CHARACTER SET
Each font in the Boxcar™ family has a full character set of 232+ letterforms, with all characters designed in the style of the font.