While looking up the old Michelin signage on French roads (and finding several websites on them which I could re-expose myself to the French language again) after having a look at
an old Spanish traffic signage manual from the Franco era, my mind wandered back to Mexico's typeface for its signage. Also, I've been (slowly but surely) building up in my font library Ray Larabie's Expressway font in most of its variants (I currently only have light, regular, book, semi-bold, and bold in the regular series and regular, book, and light in the condensed series) and I also know its a non-FHWA Series font, which also got me thinking about the Mexican road sign typeface.
Now, I know that JN Winkler has mentioned time and time again that contrary to what Wikipedia says in its Highway Gothic article (even adding a link to the appropriate MDCT section to bolster that claim) the Mexican road sign typeface is not the FHWA Series nor is it identical to it. There are visual similarities, but that is it. Although it would be nice to have someone look through the guidelines contained in the MDCT and create a digitized typeface of it (with appropriate coding for each of the 5 uppercase series plus the lowercase series), I have to ask - in the absence of such a digitized typeface, with only a visual look-through of the characters, if someone had to approximate each of the six series using FHWA Series typefaces (or look-alikes, but for the sake of argument the FHWA Series is the baseline), whether it be for illustration purposes or in RL applications without going through Semex, how would one go about doing an approximation? Even if it isn't a direct MDCT = FHWA Series equivalent. For example, in that Spanish traffic manual, while I'd like to know what that
other sans-serif is that is used in a few of the sign illustrations (and with the Caracteres Cursivos for the SI symbols for ton, kilometer, and meter) that is obviously not Caractères, I can readily tell from the descriptions of certain typefaces as "ancho" or "estrecha" (or the interestingly misnamed "cursivo" even though it is serif) which of the old and new L-series of Caractères each one is supposed to be. Can the same be also said of the MDCT series typeface?