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RE: Font Selection Process (Was: Fonts used in print)
Subject:RE: Font Selection Process (Was: Fonts used in print) From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:31:30 -0500
Doug,
I don't think anyone here is disagreeing with you. At least I'm not. As you said, the whole point is to communicate important information, and everyone has Arial and Times.
However, that last fact is relevant only for information that is being provided in electronic form for the customer to print or to view online. If you are producing a more ambitious printed document where there is a sizzle component (a data sheet for the marketing department, for example, or a book that will be published and sold in stores), font fondling takes on a bit more importance (just a bit more, not a lot more.)
What is far more important than worrying about ligatures is arranging the type on the page (regardless of font) in a way that makes it easy to read and hard to misread. (You don't want the reader skipping a line of a procedure, right?) And that requires some understanding of the principles of typography, even if you never use anything other than Arial and Times Roman. It does not require a degree in fine arts to acquire this understanding. It does require a willingness to accept that readability of a document affects its capacity to communicate effectively.
Dick
From: Doug -dot- Brode -at- valiantmachine -dot- com wrote:
>
>
>I agree with Keith on this whole font thing. I've been in tech writing since
>1983. When I first started working with desktop publishing I loved fooling
>around with different fonts. I had thousands, and we've never paid a dime for
>any of them. After a while we went with Arial and Times Roman. Those two fonts
>have done everything we need to do - deliver information. Just about everyone
>has them on their computers. (We are in a PC environment.)
>
[snipped for length]
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