Trantor Caption
The lettering that tells you where and when you are in Foundation, with a lowercase and a SemiBold.
Seventeen years after the Starbridge bombing
Terminus, the Vault — Cleon the 14th — 400 years earlier
Character set
Stylistic set 1: dotted e, like E
Default
Seventeen years, ever
ss01
Seventeen years, ever
Regular 400, 20px
The colour of the sky over Terminus was grey, and the Encyclopaedia’s café served a naïve crème brûlée for £4.50. Organise, analyse, recognise — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
SemiBold 600, 20px
The colour of the sky over Terminus was grey, and the Encyclopaedia’s café served a naïve crème brûlée for £4.50. Organise, analyse, recognise — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
About
Trantor Caption builds on Foundation One v0.4, based on the lettering Foundation sets over a scene to mark a new place or time: “Synnax”, “400 years earlier”. Its capitals have distinctive S, M, U, W, B, K and G shapes, and dots stand in for the bars of A, E, F and H. The original was capitals only, in one weight. Trantor Caption adds:
- a lowercase a–z built the same way: rounded-rectangle bowls, square-shouldered arches, flat stroke ends and a dot for the bar of f;
- a SemiBold, made by thickening the Regular;
- the Basic Latin symbols the original lacked ($ % * ^ _ ` ~);
- accented letters for UK English loanwords, £, €, …, •, ° and a no-break space;
- kerning for the lowercase;
- an optional stylistic set (
ss01) with an e that has a dot in place of its bar, like E. It is harder to read in running text, so keep it for display.
Use it for labels, captions and short lines. For the on-screen look, set it in capitals with a little extra spacing.
Using the fonts
On the web
Self-host the webfonts/ folder from the download and include its stylesheet, or load it from jsDelivr pinned to a release:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/fonts/trantor-caption.css">
<!-- or -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/desholmes/trantor-type@v1.0.0/fonts/caption/webfonts/trantor-caption.css">body { font-family: "Trantor Caption", sans-serif; } /* Regular, 400 */
strong, h1, h2 { font-weight: 600; } /* SemiBold */
.caption { font-family: "Trantor Caption", sans-serif;
text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.04em; }
.display { font-feature-settings: "ss01"; } /* dotted e */To speed up the first paint, preload the WOFF2 you use above the fold: <link rel="preload" href="/fonts/TrantorCaption-Regular.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>.
On the desktop
Install the TTFs from the download's ttf/ folder (double-click on macOS, right-click → Install on Windows). Use it in capitals for labels and captions, as on screen.
Downloads
| Everything | TrantorCaption.zip (TTF, WOFF2, WOFF, CSS, licence) |
| Webfonts | Regular WOFF2 · SemiBold WOFF2 · CSS |
| Desktop | Regular TTF · SemiBold TTF |
| Licence | SIL Open Font License 1.1 · Font log |
Licence and credits
Capitals, figures and punctuation © 2021 Roger Sperberg. Lowercase, SemiBold and Latin-1 additions © 2026 Codecup Ltd. Released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: free to use, embed and modify, but not to sell on its own. Include the licence when you redistribute the fonts.
The original licence reserves the name “FoundationOne”, so this modified version is published as Trantor Caption. Foundation is an Apple TV+ series; these fan-made fonts aren't affiliated with or endorsed by Apple, Skydance or the Asimov estate.