· font-cds, softkey, keyfonts, history
SoftKey's font empire: thousands of fonts, cheap
SoftKey was a Canadian budget-software publisher whose Key Fonts boxes put thousands of typefaces into 1990s software aisles at paperback prices. The name on the box was SoftKey’s, but the fonts inside were not: opened file by file, the libraries trace to two American clone houses, Weatherly Systems and Southern Software.
Who was SoftKey?
SoftKey began in Toronto in 1986, founded by Kevin O’Leary and John Freeman. Its formula was volume: real software, boxed and shrink-wrapped, sold at what the company called “paperback prices” through office supply and department stores. The American publishing office sat in Boca Raton, Florida, and its imprint, SoftKey Software Products of Florida, is the name on the Key Fonts packages.
The formula worked well enough to swallow competitors. In December 1995 SoftKey took over The Learning Company in a hostile deal worth $606 million, and in October 1996 it took the smaller company’s name for itself. The renamed Learning Company bought Broderbund in 1998, and Mattel bought the whole thing in 1999. That arc matters here because the font CDs sat inside it: by the time the biggest Key Fonts Pro discs were in court, the company answering for them wore a different name.
What did SoftKey sell?
Key Fonts began on floppies. A DOS edition appeared in 1991, and the 1992 sets for Windows 3.1 and Macintosh offered 100 fonts for $49. The first library leaned on text faces, most of them renamed stand-ins for famous designs, and SoftKey said so itself: the manual printed an index of equivalents, with Arena standing in for Arial and Helvetica, Cookie for Cooper Black, and Futurist for Futura. More Key Fonts followed in 1994 with a second hundred, this time nearly all display faces. The manual called them KeyFonts II, and the set shipped with at least one uncorrected typo, a Bookplate Bold file named BOOOKPB.TTF. On the Mac the same library arrived as Key More Fonts Pro, split into suitcase files across a stack of floppies. No per-disk list survives, so which faces sat on which Mac disk is undocumented. This shelf is one chapter of our wider census of font CDs.
The CD years scaled the formula up. Key Fonts Plus and Key Fonts Pro 1555 arrived in 1994, Pro 3003 in 1995, a UK edition called Key Fonts 1222 in 1996, and Fonts Pro 2002 the same year, alongside side lines like Kid Fonts and Icons and two volumes of Handwriting Fonts. One 1994 box even wears Microsoft branding over SoftKey stock, an arrangement no source we found explains. The last dated sighting is Key Fonts Pro 1.0 in 1999.
The sealed Key Fonts Pro retail box. Photo via an eBay listing.
Key Fonts Plus in its jewel case. The files inside counted 1,355 TrueType fonts, more than the cover promised. Photo via an eBay listing.
What is actually on the discs?
Most of the shelf survives as disc images on the Internet Archive, and we harvested every obtainable collection and counted what is on the discs themselves, families grouped from the files’ internal name tables. The advertised number and the counted contents are both in the table. They rarely agree, and counted by families every big disc shrinks to about half its headline.
| Collection | Year | Font files counted | Families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Key Fonts for Windows 3.1 (floppies) | 1992 | 101 TrueType | 51 |
| More Key Fonts (floppies) | 1994 | 100 TrueType | 57 |
| Key Fonts Plus CD | 1994 | 1,355 TrueType, plus Type 1 kits | 708 |
| Key Fonts Plus CD, 1995 edition | 1995 | 1,344 TrueType, plus Type 1 kits | 699 |
| Key Fonts Pro 1555 CD | 1994 | 1,557 TrueType, plus Type 1, Mac and NeXT editions | 793 |
| “Fonts Pro” selection disc | undated | 302 TrueType | 168 |
| Key Fonts Pro 3003 CD | 1995 | 3,095 TrueType, plus Type 1 kits | 1,607 |
| Key Fonts 1222 (UK) CD | 1996 | 1,319 TrueType, plus Type 1 kits | 748 |
| Fonts Pro 2002 CD | 1996 | 2,024 TrueType, plus Mac suitcases | 1,164 |
| Handwriting Fonts CD | 1996 | 300 TrueType | 300 |
| Kid Fonts & Icons CD | 1995 | 20 TrueType, plus clip art | 10 |
Every collection’s complete font list is published in the SoftKey collections index, with each list also downloadable as data.
Two patterns stand out. Some discs are re-pressings: the 1995 Plus edition is the 1994 disc again, identical file for file apart from one dropped family group and a single changed file, and the UK 1222 disc is a cut-down of Pro 3003 with every TrueType file byte-identical. Others are new pours of the same library. Pro 3003 shares no identical file with Pro 1555, yet the earlier library is plainly inside it, hundreds of families carried over and hundreds more added. Fonts Pro 2002 then draws on the same library a third time. Even the honest counts hide jokes at the box’s expense: the 1992 set advertised 100 fonts and shipped 101 files, because its Dingbats clone came as two files.
Key Fonts Pro 2002. Photo via an eBay listing.
Which fonts are on the floppy sets?
The two floppy sets are small enough to name in full. The 1992 set’s families, with the designs they stood in for where the manual’s equivalents index names them: Americo, Arena Condensed and Arena Outline [Arial and Helvetica], Avian [Avant Garde], Basset [Baskerville], Bordeaux [Bauhaus], Boston [Bodoni], Brush Hand, Brush Script, Casque Open Face [Caslon Open Face], Chancery, Cookie [Cooper Black], Cornet [Coronet], Dingbats, Formal Script [Spenser Script], Fritz [Friz Quadrata], Futurist [Futura], Garnet [Garamond], Gilde [Goudy], Grail Light [Graphic Light], Hammer [Harry], Hobby Headline [Hobo], Keycaps, Koffee [Kaufmann], Krone [Korinna], Letter Gothic, Marquee [Broadway], Minstrel Script [Mistral], Old English Gothic, OCR-A, Optim [Optima], Oracle [Orator], Palamino [Palatino], Park Place [Park Avenue], Schoolbook [Century Schoolbook], Soutane [Souvenir], Stencil, Technical [Tekton], Ultra [Umbra], and Vagabond [VAG Rounded].
More Key Fonts (1994) is display faces almost throughout, 100 files in 57 families. The family’s second column is the file name as it shipped, 8.3 uppercase and all.
| Family | Files |
|---|---|
| Aladdin | ALADDIN |
| Anastasia | ANASTAS |
| Arena Black Extended | ARENBKE, ARENBKEI |
| Aristocrat | ARSTOCRT |
| Bailey | BAILEY |
| Barcode 3 of 9 | BARCD39 |
| Bookplate | BOOKP, BOOOKPB, BOOKPI, BOOKPBI |
| Brandyscript | BRANDYSC |
| BrushDom | BRUSHDOM |
| Brushstroke Hollow | BRSHSTHO |
| Casque | CASQUE, CASQUEB, CASQUEI, CASQUEBI |
| Cassia | CASSIA |
| Civic | CIVIC, CIVICB, CIVICI, CIVICBI, CIVICBK, CIVICBKI |
| Cocktail | COCKTL, COCKTLB, COCKTLI, COCKTLBI |
| Columbo | COLUMBO |
| CompStyle | COMPSTYL |
| Cookie Hollow | COOKYH, COOKYHI |
| Dogwood | DOGWOOD |
| Domaigne | DOMAIGNE |
| Ergoe-Mild | ERGOM, ERGOMB, ERGOMI, ERGOMBI, ERGOMXB, ERGOMXBI, ERGOMBK, ERGOMBKI |
| Eurose HeavyFace | EUROH, EUROHI |
| Fastrac Fashion | FASTRAC |
| Florentine Script | FLORNT |
| Florentine SwashCaps | FLORNTSC |
| Futurist Condensed | FUTRC, FUTRCB, FUTRCI, FUTRCBI |
| Gaelic | GAELIC |
| Giligan | GILIGBLK, GILIGXB |
| Grail New | GRAILNEW |
| Grail New Condensed | GRAILNC |
| GraverPlate | GRAVER, GRAVERB |
| Halloween | HALLOWN |
| Handy-Brush | HNDYBRSH |
| Institution | INSTITUT |
| Kabob | KABOBXB, KABOBBLK |
| Lapland | LAPLND, LAPLNDB, LAPLNDI, LAPLNDBI |
| Liddie | LIDDIE, LIDDBLK |
| Louisianne | LOUISNNE |
| Luftwaffe | LUFTWAFF |
| Memoir | MEMOIR, MEMOIRB, MEMOIRI, MEMOIRBI |
| Mitzvah | MITZVAH |
| Monotone | MONOTONE |
| Penyae Bold | PENYAEB |
| Ramona | RAMONA |
| Revel | REVEL |
| Roman Fixed-width | ROMANFW, ROMANFWB |
| Slalom | SLALOM |
| Slicker | SLICKER |
| Stencil Sans | STNSNS, STNSNSC, STNSNSXB |
| Tango | TANGO |
| Timbrel | TIMBRL, TIMBRLB, TIMBRLI, TIMBRLBI |
| Trekker | TREKKER |
| Trekker-Two | TREKKER2 |
| Truffle | TRUFFLE |
| Trufflette | TRUFLTTE |
| University | UNIVRSTY |
| Vagabond Heavy Outline | VAGABNDO |
| Wanted Poster | WNTDPSTR |
Whose fonts were they, really?
Every font file carries a name table with copyright and version fields, and those fields answer the question the boxes avoid. Start with the floppies. The 1992 files wear SoftKey’s copyright in one field, misspellings and all (“striclty”, “Producst”), but the version field of every file reads “(C)opyright 1992 W.S.I.” W.S.I. is Weatherly Systems, the Huntsville, Alabama clone house. A later selection disc spells it out in the copyright field itself, with fonts taken “From the WSI-FONT Collection” and Weatherly Systems written in full. The Handwriting Fonts disc is just as explicit: its internal product name is Handwriting KeyFonts, its publisher field names SoftKey Multimedia, and its data field says the font data came under commercial license from W.S.I., the company’s Huntsville phone number, area code 205, preserved in the file.
Handwriting Fonts. The names worked into the cover, Acacia’s Hand, Avery’s Hand, Carter’s Hand and the rest, are the product: 300 people’s handwriting, digitized. Photo via an eBay listing.
The big CDs name a different maker. No SoftKey string appears inside the Plus or Pro files at all; the copyright holder is Southern Software, Inc., the company run by Paul Eric King and profiled in our Southern Software post. Its families sign their work in their names. The Plus and 1555 generation ends family names with a spaced “SSi” suffix, while the 3003 generation runs the words together and ends them “SSK”: AbacusFourSSK and its kin. The 1555 disc even preserves the toolchain. Its NeXT edition files carry headers reading “Created with FontMonger”, dated May 1993 and naming Ares Software, the tool’s maker. FontMonger is the editor Southern Software built its library with.
Put together, the files suggest SoftKey’s font business was retail, not type design: finished libraries came in from Weatherly, then from Southern Software, and SoftKey’s boxes, brands, and store placement carried them out. Castcraft ran the same arrangement from Chicago with its OPTI library.
What happened when Adobe sued?
Southern Software’s method was the legal problem. Working with FontMonger-class tools, King extracted the outline data from Adobe’s own font files, scaled the vertical coordinates slightly, and renamed the results: Adobe’s Utopia shipped as Veracity. Southern Software licensed the Key Fonts Pro line to The Learning Company, the renamed SoftKey, which put the discs into national retail. Adobe sued both companies in October 1995.
On February 2, 1998, Judge Whyte granted Adobe summary judgment on the copyright claim. The specific selection of points that makes up a font program is original authorship, and mechanically scaling copied points does not make them new. The Learning Company settled for $2 million and withdrew the font CDs from sale. The full case is in our copyright explainer and the Southern Software profile.
What survives?
The Key Font Pro 3,003 and KeyCad Pro bundle disc, packaged with Adobe tryout software. Photo via an eBay listing.
The secondhand market and the Internet Archive have kept most of the shelf alive, but the Archive’s labels deserve the same skepticism as the boxes. Three of its SoftKey items are not what they claim. The disc filed as the German KeyFonts Pro 1222 is byte-identical to the Key Fonts Plus CD; only its cover scans are German, and the actual German disc is not there. The Pro item is the genuine 1993 Pro hybrid CD: its Windows session duplicates the selection disc, its Mac side is a full second library, and it holds no shareware. And the item named SoftKey ClickArt 10,000 Fonts is not a SoftKey product at all: it is the ClickArt Fonts 2 CD from the Broderbund line, uploaded under a misleading name.
What is genuinely missing is a short list: the 1991 DOS set, Handwriting Fonts Vol. II, the separate Key Fonts Pro 2002 editions, Key Fonts Pro 1.0 from 1999, and the Font Master manager. The 1992 Macintosh floppy sets are no longer on it: both editions surfaced on Macintosh Repository and have been counted. Those survive as physical media, surfacing in the same listings that supplied the photographs for this post.
Handwriting Fonts Vol. II, one of the volumes no digital copy of has surfaced for. Photo via an eBay listing.
The boxes promised a number. The files, counted and read, tell the truer story, and they are why this shelf is worth keeping.