NYC Subway Bullets fonts¶
1 2 3 A C E 7d SIR
OpenType color fonts of the New York City Subway route bullets, plus a
LaTeX package (nycbullets) for using them. See every bullet in the
specimen.
You must take the A train
To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem— Ella Fitzgerald
Same faces every day, but you don't know their names
Party people going places on the D train— Beastie Boys
The artwork comes from the New York City Subway bullets collection on Wikimedia Commons. Nearly all of it is in the public domain; the exceptions are listed in the credits. Each Commons set becomes one font:
| Font | Commons set |
|---|---|
| NYCSubwayBullets-Standard.ttf | Standard set |
| NYCSubwayBullets-Helvetica.ttf | Helvetica set |
| NYCSubwayBullets-NYCTA.ttf | NYCTA Standard Medium set |
| NYCSubwayBullets-R62A.ttf | R62A |
| NYCSubwayBullets-R32.ttf | R32 |
| NYCSubwayBullets-Retired.ttf | Retired (with subcategories) |
| NYCSubwayBullets-Legacy.ttf | Legacy set |
| NYCSubwayBullets-All.ttf | all of the above, each once |
Or download them all at once: NYCSubwayBullets.zip (the fonts, their credits and licenses).
Each font contains three versions of every bullet. Applications use the one they support:
- a COLR/CPAL color table, used by LuaLaTeX, Chrome and Windows;
- an SVG color table, used by Safari, macOS and Adobe applications;
- monochrome outlines as a fallback.
Typing bullets¶
Type the route's key. The keys are ligatures, so they work in any application that applies standard ligatures:
| key | bullet |
|---|---|
F |
F, circle (local) |
Fd |
F, diamond (express) |
SIR |
Staten Island Railway |
M.brown |
variant: brown M |
- |
dash bullet |
Separate adjacent bullets with spaces: A C E, not ACE. Every bullet
also has a Private Use Area code point. The full key and code point tables
are in the specimen and in the
package documentation.
In the All font, keys outside the Standard set carry a set tag after the
route, e.g. F.helv or B.nycta.broadway.
LaTeX¶
% compile with lualatex
\usepackage{nycbullets}
...
Take the \nycbullet{F} or \nycbullet{Fd} to Coney Island.
\nycbullet[helvetica]{M.brown}
See the package documentation. To install it into your
TEXMFHOME, run make install in a checkout of the
repository.
Rebuilding¶
The whole pipeline is scripted and reproducible:
make all # download → key tables → fonts → specimens → LaTeX docs
make check # Python and l3build tests
See Building the fonts for what each step does, how to edit the keys, and how to refresh from Commons.
License¶
The fonts are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0, except the bullets listed in the credits, which keep their own licenses. The LaTeX package is under the LaTeX Project Public License 1.3c or later, the build pipeline under the MIT license, and this documentation under CC BY 4.0.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by the MTA; the bullets may be trademarks of the MTA.