main page > Orach Technic CJK Manifest
Orach Technic CJK MANIFEST
This Manifest is dedicated to my dear friend, Aleksandar D. Nikolic, who passed away long ago (in the year 2000).Aleksandar worked at the state printing house “Glas” in Belgrade and was a great lover of letters.
In the late 80s and early 90s we worked on font development.
Letters were pasted all over the walls, shelves filled with binders of fonts, and catalogs from the largest type foundries.
Whenever he had a free day, Aleksandar (Aca, as we called him) would come to our studio just to look at and admire the letters.
We would make him a large coffee, he would sit at a table in the corner, take out his graphic loupe…
he never asked anything, he never bothered anyone, he just looked at the catalogs and enjoyed the letters.
He wasn’t interested in drawing anything or participating in the work of the company.
He simply loved to look at letters and satisfy that inner, spiritual need.
Who today would go to a company just to look at letters? They would probably think the man had completely lost his mind.
There was also a binder where I kept everything I had come across about Chinese writing — more as rarities
I couldn’t throw away, even though I never imagined I would one day actually work on that.
Looking through that binder, Aca asked me: how many letters do the Chinese have, and how do they write with them?
I said they were not letters but symbols — ideograms.
“If they use them to write, then they are letters,” he replied.
“Well, all right, let them be letters,” I said.
We never contradicted each other, never had sharp arguments. If our opinions differed, we always laughed.
In the binder there was a picture of a Buddhist monk writing beautiful calligraphic characters with something unfamiliar to him.
“It’s not a pen, it’s not a reed… what is this the monk is writing with?” he asked.
It’s a special calligraphy brush made of animal hair.
“And what kind of hair is that?”
Well, I truly didn’t know then. What I did know was that the softest was made from rabbit,
and the hardest from the chest hair of a wild boar.
So we just guessed and laughed about it.
Now I look it up on the internet — an entire story about it.
“Why don’t you give me this picture so I can put it under my pillow?”
“What do you need it for when we don’t even know what it says?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Look how good it looks.
When you hear a good song, you don’t know the words, yet you like it.”
That sentence of his - Give me that picture (those letters) so I can put it under my pillow”
awoke the deepest feelings in me.
“There’s my brother in letters,” I thought to myself.
Such love for the letter I have never seen again in my life.
At that time, for every catalog we had to write a request, ask, pay, and sometimes wait for months.
And when it arrived — it was pure joy.
Of all those catalogs and type foundries, after so many years, two remained dominant in my memory:
the German H. Berthold and the Japanese Morisawa.
If I, today, after all these years, had to say whose letters I would put under my pillow
it would certainly be the letters of Morisawa.
Rest in peace, my dear friend.
This Orach Technic CJK Manifest I dedicate to you, as a declaration of the beginning of my work on a CJK font.
I don’t know if I will manage to complete it, but I’m certain of one thing: I began it with love, thinking of you.
Branko M. Stevanović
2025.
* * *
What we can offer today
Orach Technic Pro 6.35 - All glyphs
(.pdf document, 56MB, 108 page)
Orach Technic STENCIL Pro 6.35 - All glyphs
(.pdf document, 3MB, 60 page)
*Orach Technic Pro is a InfoFORM's (Belgrade-Serbia) font,
developed from 1988 to 2025.