Experiment

Chit Typesetter

A blood chit is a sheet of cloth an airman carries so that a stranger who finds him can read, in their own language, who he is and what he is asking for. This sets one: a flag, a message repeated across as many languages as you like, and the imprint and classification marks along the foot. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type or load is sent anywhere.

Sheet

Flag

Two flags are drawn as vectors at the official ratios — 1:1.9, union 0.76×0.5385, stars 0.0616 of the hoist. A 1951 sheet carried 48 stars, which is the default. The 13-star ring is an 18th-century design and those flags had no standard proportion — it is drawn on the same ratio for consistency, so adjust the aspect if you want a period one. Load any image instead and it stays in your browser.

Marking

Composition run 1 — compact

Composition run 2 — separate

Period chits were composed in more than one shop. Run 2 is the separately-set copy that never matched the Latin blocks — a different family, a larger body, looser tracking and leading.

Labels & paragraph

Blocks

    Footer

    About the text

    The sheet loads with the safe-conduct message from the USAF chart service's European chit KM-51-1, lithographed April 1951. That is a work of the United States federal government and carries no copyright. The wording was transcribed by eye from a photograph of one surviving sheet, so treat it as unverified — including its own typographic inconsistencies, which are preserved rather than corrected. Persian is on the original plate. Greek and Arabic have since been transcribed and ship with the sheet; Persian still ships empty — it is handwritten in a cursive nastaliq hand that the photograph does not resolve well enough to reproduce honestly, and a plausible guess would be worse than a blank you can fill yourself.

    Chinese, Japanese and Korean blocks fall back to whatever fonts your own system provides. A usable web subset of those scripts runs to several megabytes, which is more than this page should weigh.