Artist and calligrapher Daniel Reeve, well known for the lettering and maps in The Lord of the Rings films, is creating hand-crafted fonts of some of his writing styles - Kereru is the inaugural release, allowing users to emulate some of his much-admired calligraphy.

Nominally a half-uncial style, clever arrangements of the stylistic sets allow Kereru to be set as full uncial or standard roman, as well as offering numerous alternates, ligatures, swashes and flourishes, ornaments, unlimited fractions, scientific inferiors and numeric superscript, all accessible via OpenType features. Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are included, in addition to the letters required for all the languages of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic.

Kereru is very legible and easy on the eye, without sacrificing calligraphic flair. A pdf description of the Stylistic Sets and their usage is included with the font package, which comprises regular, bold and italic variations. Kereru Italic supercedes and improves upon its previous incarnation, Shire Regular.

The name Kereru comes from New Zealand’s Maori language - it is our native wood pigeon, a bird of generous and rounded form, like the font itself.