[5] Erbar was originally cast by the Ludwig & Mayer foundry of Frankfurt, Germany, with machine composition matrices later being offered by German and then American Linotype.

Other variants were offered: The success of Erbar inspired the creation of many new geometric sans-serif faces by competing foundries, including Futura, Metro, Vogue, Spartan and Twentieth Century among others.

Phosphor, an ultra-bold and inline display that was design similar to Erbar but was released first, was particularly popular, and several imitations and revivals were created.

Zhurnalnaya roublennaya (Журнальная рубленая), or Journal Grotesque, was a Russian sans-serif that was created in the Soviet Union by Anatoly Schukin and others and released from 1947 onwards, was quite loosely inspired by Erbar and with Cyrillic and later Latin characters.

[19] Zhurnalnaya roublennaya has itself been digitised by Grilli Type as GT Eesti and (much more loosely) for ParaType as Journal Sans by Olexa Volochay, Maria Selezeneva and Alexandra Korolkova.