In 1938, his apprenticeship over, Zapf was introduced to the Stempel foundry, and began work on his first typeface, a blackletter called Gilgenhart. While there he was inspired by an exhibition of the work of Rudolf Koch, the German type designer, to take up calligraphy, which he studied in his spare time with such intensity that his parents would remonstrate with him about overuse of the electric lights late at night. Zapf was thereby prevented from studying engineering, and instead became an apprentice retoucher in a printing firm.

In 1933, the year he left school, his father lost his job in a car factory because of his trade union activities.

Zapf was born in Nuremberg three days before the end of fighting in the first world war. It has gone on to become one of the world’s most widely used typefaces. It was clearly influenced by Italian letterforms, even though at that stage Zapf had never been to Italy. Palatino was quite unlike anything produced in pre-war Germany. Zapf worked for the Stempel foundry and in 1949 he designed the Palatino typeface for it. Its type foundries needed new Roman types since blackletter, the traditional script once regarded by the Nazis as quintessentially German, had been replaced by the Roman alphabet as the standard in 1941. Immediately after the second world war, Frankfurt became the centre of West Germany’s book trade. Zapf is one of the few people who designed letters for all three methods. He also brought his calligraphic talent to the design of a string of typefaces over seven decades, a period in which the industry moved rapidly from hot metal typesetting through photocomposition to digitisation. He could draw a faultless line just as easily with chalk on a board or with a ballpoint on a school pad, and in 1960 was chosen to write out the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations, held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

Zapf, who has died aged 96, showed off these sumptuous drawing skills on many occasions over his long life, not always with the calligrapher’s usual tools of nibbed pen or fine brush. He went on to give an inspired lecture on the different angles that a calligrapher uses when holding a pen, and how strokes differ between calligraphy and typography – all illustrated, not with slides, but with impeccably executed chalk drawings. In 1963 Hermann Zapf walked into an American design school, snapped a piece of chalk in half and, with its side edge, drew a perfect lowercase g on the blackboard.

Zapf chancery the office