Chronotype is a workshop of generators, and it is licensed. What the generators know is not. Every dated rule behind them — what a medicine carton had to say in 1957, when a Greek newspaper stopped setting breathings, which press could hold a hairline on newsprint — is published openly, and anyone who knows better is invited to correct it.
Contributing should cost less effort than the knowledge is worth. Pick whichever of these is nearest to how you already work.
Every entry in the Archive has a suggest a correction link. It brings you to the form below with the entry already filled in. Add what you know, say where it can be verified, say how you want to be credited. No account, no sign-in, no e-mail client.
You do not have to write anything. If you can point an entry at a book, a scan, an archive reference or an act of parliament, send the pointer and nothing else. An entry with a source is something a production office can put in a file.
A country, a decade, a trade nobody here has covered. Use the shape below. If it is a whole area — Portuguese labelling, Turkish newspapers, Nordic pack law — write first and we will work out how to fit it.
Six fields. The two that matter most are the two that are usually missing from a reference work: why, in words a person can act on, and where it was verified.
what Braille on medicine cartons, at Marburg Medium pitch
where European Union
when from 2005
why A carton after 2005 carries the product name in Braille, and it is
embossed rather than printed — so it catches the light and shows in
a close-up even when the type does not. Before 2005 the panel is flat.
source Directive 2004/27/EC, article 56a · verified against a 2007 carton
who your name, or "no credit"
The why is written for somebody dressing a set at eight in the morning, not for a footnote. It says what changed and how you can see it on the object. If an entry cannot be written that way, it is probably not a fact about the object — it is a fact about a law, and it belongs in the source line.
The source can be modest. “My father’s pharmacy, Volos, packets kept from the 1960s” is a real source and a good one. What it cannot be is absent, or a link to something that only summarises somebody else.
No account, no sign-in, no e-mail client. It goes straight to the Archive’s own server — not to a form company, not to an analytics service, not to anyone else.
These are the same rules the studios themselves are built on. They are short, and they are not negotiable, because the whole product rests on being able to say them to a production’s legal department with a straight face.
The Archive — every entry, every date, every explanation — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it, quote it, print it, teach from it, build a rival product on it, commercially or not. The only condition is that you say where it came from and credit the people who put it there.
Attribution is not a formality here. Every contributor is named against what they contributed, and that record travels with the data. If you would rather not be named, say so and you will not be.
The studios are licensed separately. The software has its own terms — free where nobody on a production is paid, banded to the budget where they are. That pays for the work. The research does not need to be paid for twice, and keeping the two apart is deliberate: if Chronotype disappeared tomorrow, the Archive would still be there and still be free.