Acura Name Pen 600

In South Korea and Japan, marker pens are referred to as “sign pens”, “name pens”, or “felt pens”. Also, permanent pens are also referred to as “Magic” (from a famous pen brand name).

A marker pen, fine liner, marking pen, felt-tip pen, flow marker, sign pen (in South Korea), vivid (in New Zealand), texta (in Australia), sketch pen (in South Asia) or koki (in South Africa), is a pen which has its own ink source and a tip made of porous, pressed fibers such as felt.^[1] A marker pen consists of a container (glass, aluminum or plastic) and a core of an absorbent material. This filling serves as a carrier for the ink. The upper part of the marker contains the nib that was made in earlier times of a hard felt material, and a cap to prevent the marker from drying out. Until the early 1990s, the most common solvents that were used for the ink were toluene and xylene. These two substances are both harmful and characterized by a very strong smell. Today, the ink is usually made on the basis of alcohols (e.g. 1-Propanol, 1-butanol, diacetone alcohol and cresols). Markers may be waterproof, dry-erase, wet-erase (e.g. transparency markers), or permanent.