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I never knew there was so much to be known about fonts! I appreciate the
erudite discussion. Unfortunately, to more the discussion a bit back to the
mundane world of technical communication, I must point out three
considerations that must stand front and center in selecting a font: the
availability of the font at the point of delivery, the ease of converting the
font from one delivery medium to another, and, if you determine you want to
change, handling legacy document files.
Where I last worked, we started out printing our technical documents in-house
using Macs. The body-copy font was Century Schoolbook and the headline (level
head) font was Century Gothic. Within a year we were using PCs and delivering
PostScript files to a print vendor; within four we were delivering PDF files
to a different print vendor and making PDF files for direct delivery to
clients. For these files we settled on Palatino for body copy and Helvetica
for headlines. (We also used Courier for data examples and Symbol for bullets
and other symbols--four faces in all.) The reasons for selecting them were
more practical than aesthetic:
* They are all basic PostScript Type 1 fonts that every PostScript printing
device has in memory.
* Every print vendor has PostScript Type 1 fonts on hand (see above).
* PostScript Type 1 fonts convert cleanly and compactly in Adobe Acrobat and
can be searched online.
* If converted to Web display, their online analogues look roughly the same.
* They exist on at least Mac and PC platforms (and on UNIX too?).
These considerations knocked out almost everything else. It was a
disappointment to settle on such mundane fonts, but we were trying to crank
out documents without a lot of fuss without offending the eye.
Once we settled on these fonts and made the switch, we had a lingering
problem with legacy documents. We could never seem to eradicate all traces of
the old fonts. Even switching from Word to FrameMaker, traces of them
lingered in old documents like pockets of infection, showing up when we
distilled the files. We looked everywhere: reference pages, master pages,
empty paragraph markers, unused styles. We even found traces in table
definitions we never used. (I still smile whenever someone mentions "clean
data conversion.")
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