Pierre Haultin was a contemporary punchcutter of the well known Claude Garamond and the lesser known Robert Granjon. In the earlier years of their careers, each of them practised for a while in Paris. All three of them were, probably, ambitious young men, descending from families that held a foot in printing and publishing or fine metal work and jewelry.

Claude Garamond is the best known, of all three of them, due to his good connections. After all he was commissioned the cut the Greque du Roi. Somehow having connections with the royal court does pay off even centuries later. Robert Granjon comes next, but perhaps Granjon is still overshadowed by a fourth but younger very well known Parisian punchcutter Guillaume le Bé. Robert Granjon had the biggest output of all four, but second is Pierre Haultin. Haultin is however rather unknown, but he is a punchcutter to reckon with. A man with a clear goal and probably the one who fits our image of the early punchcutter best. A person who has a deeper understanding of most of the processes with in the printing trade. Somebody who could cut type, or woodcut illustrations who would make casting moulds and justify matrices. He could not be fooled when it came down to the quality of presswork, who could oversee, and plan the casting of type as well as judging the overall quality of it and, at the same time, having a sense and ambition for publishing. In short, a person not only very familiar but also trained in the all the important stages of printing, and the reach of it.

Haultin is a fervent believer in the calvinistic branch of Christian religion. His aim is to help in spreading the only right and holy word, and printing is a good aid in that. For a big part Haultin is cutting type in order to reach a higher goal. In some way he is a true propagandist and in his cutting he is therefore rather pragmatic. It should be readable and efficient concerning space. So Haultin strives for a efficient typography which makes the printing of small, cheap and compact handheld bibles a reality.

Concerning true typographic material there is unfortunately little left, except for some matrices of rather small-sized type, either greek or roman, and a few italics. Some of these were still in use well into the early 19th century. In looking at Haultin’s original work, we depend mainly on printed material. And from that material, Smeijers distilled what he would call his interpretation of a Haultin-ic roman and italic.

The Smeijers Haultin design is an efficient text face, stylistically belonging to the Garamond-class of typefaces, but it is not a revived digital version of the historical material. Instead, Smeijers designed a contemporary typeface respecting its primary historical sources but, just as with Renard, delivering a characterful contemporary design, subtly answering on the book and editorial designers’ needs for a fresh serifed design. For designs requiring weight variations that gently alter the text’s colour, Smeijers designed three variants of Normal weight: NormalLight, Normal, and NormalDark.

The Haultin family consists of 12 weights of roman and italic designs. Haultin is equipped with a full range of Latin Extended glyphs, Lining and Old-Style figures, small capitals, and small capital currency-, figures-, math-, and case-sensitive punctuation.

Haultin fonts are available in OTF CFF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats. Legacy font formats are available on request.