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Subject:Perils of san serif! From:Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Wed, 9 Aug 1995 14:50:07 LCL
Some time back, we discussed the merits and demerits of using sans
serif fonts for body text. I just got hit with a related "gotcha"
today that might affect some of you'uns. Here's the sad tale: <grin>
We're using an otherwise pleasant sans serif font for headings in our
newsletter, and it worked just fine in English. But when we did the
French layout, we discovered that the lower-case L and the upper case
I appeared identical in this font. This is a problem given that we
twice had to use the "l'I" (lower-case L preceding upper case I)
sequence of characters. Ugh! You might encounter similar problems with
sans serif, particularly if you're using it for longer stretches of
text (body text), and you may only catch the problem at the
proofreading stage (if at all). Beware!
(For the francophones among us, the solution was to drop the L' and
use a telegraphic tabloid heading style. Thus, "Congres mondiale de
l'IUFRO" became "Congres mondiale IUFRO". Not the best solution, but
it works OK.)
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of
our reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.
