Claudius Roman is a san-serif Roman font. I created it primarily for the purpose of teaching myself METAFONT, and it later occurred to me that it would make a good basis for others learning to use METAFONT by providing them with a very simple and well-commented implementation of a typeface. I felt that as a Roman font it deserved a Roman name, and when considering the options I came across Claudius, from the Roman family name which was derived from Latin »claudus« meaning »lame« or »crippled«. This seemed apt for a typeface that is not really intended for use in actual documents.
Claudius Roman is also crippled in a few other senses. At present it only provides uppercase glyphs, and a comma and a period. In some sense this is fitting because lowercase Latin glyphs only evolved later. Arabic numerals are not included either. However, I have plans to develop an accompanying set of lowercase and numeric glyphs, thus have chosen to call this release version 0.5 to indicate that it is not yet »complete«.
Claudius Roman is based loosely on the calligraphic teachings found in Margaret Shepard's book Learn Calligraphy: The Complete Book of Lettering and Design.
The code that generated Claudius Roman is licensed under the FSF General Public License. Bug fixes, improvements, and suggestions are welcome.