The Miller family was designed by Matthew Carter and developed with the assistance of the Font Bureau's
Tobias Frere-Jones and
Cyrus Highsmith, and the encouragement of
James Mosley, a librarian at the
St Bride Library of the history of printing in London. Miller is a "Scotch Roman"—a style which originated in types sold by Scottish type foundries of Alexander Wilson and William Miller in the period of 1810–1820. According to
Thomas Curson Hansard these were mostly cut by
punchcutter Richard Austin of London. This attribution is accepted by Austin's biographer Alastair Johnston (Hansard was writing in 1825, during Austin's lifetime) although Mosley had earlier expressed caution on the attribution. Although Miller remains faithful to the Scotch Roman style, it is not based on any single historical example. The flat-topped lowercase "t" is not original to Miller's or Wilson's types, but a "wrong font" Didone sort introduced later — possibly by mistake — that became entrenched in the style in the latter half of the 19th century. Certain other letters, such as the lowercase "k" and the Text cut's default capital "R", are drawn from other faces cut by Richard Austin, such as
his type for John Bell. Mosley described Carter's revival of Miller as follows: Matthew Carter's Miller is not a facsimile of Miller's Scotch Roman, any more than his
Galliard was a facsimile of any one type by
Robert Granjon. What it has done is to capture the good color, and the generous breadth and modelling of its model, and to bring a valid version of 'Scotch Roman' back into current use after a lapse [in England] of some decades. Miller was made with current production needs in mind, of which the two versions, 'Display' and the more robust 'Text' versions are evidence, and so is its relatively large x-height. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and Miller, Carter said, "I was familiar with Scotch Romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular...and then they disappeared completely." Carter as a companion digitised a Greek typeface based on British printing of the same period, based on the spare
Porson typeface cut (in this case certainly) by Richard Austin and based on the handwriting of British classicist
Richard Porson. Miller's default numerals are historically appropriate "hybrid" or "semi-lining" figures, slightly shorter than upper-case and in some cases descending below the baseline, although alternative more conventional full-height lining or
text figures styles are offered. ==Variants==