The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name.

The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a “typographical engineer”, but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey.

As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps