Re: Font choices

["Linda K. Sherman" <linsherm -at- CONCENTRIC -dot- NET>]

Bruce Byfield wrote:
>
> And, come to think of it, I would argue that Time is readable only
> because of its familiarity. By any of the usual standards of
> readability, such as large x-heights, dozens of fonts are better
> choices. For example, Palatino is extremely popular, but it remains a
> good choice because of its readability.

If memory serves, and often it doesn't at my age, Palatino was
originally intended as a headline font, something which I think many
people don't pause to consider because the widespread practice of using
sans-serif fonts like Helvetica and Arial for headlines and headings has
gotten all of us into the habit of thinking that anything with serifs
available in 12 point size or less must be a text font.

A real-world example: a friend of mine who had developed a software
product on his own set his user manual in Palatino on his Mac and
printed it on the doddering old 300x300 Apple laser printer at the local
Kinko's. I got an eyestrain headache reading the draft version (older
eyes like mine are more sensitive to this). We tried printing it in
Palatino, Postscript Times, and TrueType Times on my 600x600 HP4M. The
PS Times version was the winner, hands down. On a different printer--who
knows? We didn't have another laser to try it on.

I believe the popularity of Palatino has less to do with its readability
on the printed page than with the fact that for some obscure technical
reason it was more readable on the Apple monitor than were the
Postscript versions of Times, which always looked like junk on the Mac's
screen, even when a bit-mapped screen version was available.

Since spacing and thickness can be affected by the things like DPI
resolution, paper quality, toner quality, Postscript vs. TrueType vs. HP
PCL vs. something else, character spacing and justification algorithms,
and whether the computer/printer draws characters by "outlining" or
"inlining" them, I long ago adopted the policy of printing out sample
pages from the document with different fonts and seeing which simply
looked best to the naked eye. The results are not always what I think
they will be, despite the fact that I've been using the same venerable
HP4M for more years than I can count (bought it right after they first
came out) and should know all its little tricks by now.

L.
--
Linda K. Sherman <linsherm -at- concentric -dot- net>
Welsh-related and other stuff to be found at
http://www.concentric.net/~linsherm