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Arlen never said he could produce a "document with beautiful production
values in 10 seconds"; what he said was that he could "pick a font in 10
seconds and produce serviceable, usable, and clear, though perhaps not
elegant, documents".
You go on to point out flaws you've encountered in documents recently.
That's all well and good but those of us who've been doing this stuff for a
few years have learned to avoid those amateurish mistakes.
Would I get criticized by a typography purist because my font choices for
my client's documents included the pedestrian Arial, Times New Roman and
Courier New fonts?? Sure. Do I believe that these documents could be made
marginally more readable by choosing different fonts? I suppose it's
possible but my belief (based on nothing but my own experience) is that the
operative word there is "marginally". I could spend weeks analysing my font
choices on my client's behalf and perhaps improve the readability by less
than 1%. Sorry, but I don't believe that my client would be willing to pay
the freight for it and I would never attempt to force the issue.
The largest software company in the world spent millions of dollars
developing Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New and they've generously
provided them to everyone who has a copy of Windows. They're okay with me.
Mike
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Mike Starr WriteStarr Information Services
Technical Writer - Online Help Developer - Technical Illustrator
Graphic Designer - Desktop Publisher - MS Office Expert
Office: (262) 694-1028 - Pager: (414) 318-9509 - Fax: (262) 697-6334
Home (262) 694-0932 - mike -at- writestarr -dot- com - http://www.writestarr.com
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