RE: Bored with TNR, Arial, Garamond, and Verdana - Any Ideas?

["Andrew Warren" <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>]

Barbara Vega wrote:

> Any suggestions for alternates to Arial and Verdana, and TNR and
> Garamond for headings? This is for Electronic copy - Online help, not
> for printed copy. I am so bored with these (in the subject of this
> email). I want to do something different but I want to stay reasonably
> conservative too. Can you make some suggestions of some that look
nice?
> Serif or Sans Serif are fine, because whichever I go with for the
> headings I will make the body copy the other

Barbara:

There was a brief moment in the mid-80s when the hot combo was thought
to be Avant Garde for titles and Palatino for body text... I'm not sure
why, since Avant Garde is SO hard to use, but I suppose you could give
that pairing a try.

Before choosing new fonts, though, you may want to take into account
these factors:

1. Arial and Times New Roman (or Helvetica and Times, and code to
automatically substitute them) are likely to exist on every computer
capable of displaying your documents, and on every printer capable of
printing them.  Verdana and Garamond will be on most computers and in
many printers.

Other fonts are not so universally available.  Unless your documents can
include embedded fonts, users will read them in whatever font their
system chooses... Which will probably be Times New Roman for
proportional serif fonts, Arial for proportional sans-serif, and Courier
New for fixed-width fonts.

2. Most fonts are designed for printing; only a few -- like Verdana --
are specifically designed for on-screen display.  Even at fairly large
sizes, designed-for-print fonts often look pretty bad when used
on-screen.  Also, some fonts render quite differently at different
sizes.

You should test your font choices at different point sizes and at
different screen resolutions to make sure that a) they don't look
different than you expect, and b) they still look better than the fonts
you're bored with.

3. Windows XP offers two choices for font-smoothing: ClearType for LCD
monitors, and a standard anti-aliasing method for other monitors.  Some
other versions of Windows offer just one method, a few versions of
Windows offer none, and I don't know what you get on a Mac these days.

OS-imposed font-smoothing can make some fonts unreadable, and lack of it
can make others really ugly, so you MUST test your fonts using all the
algorithms (and none) that'll be available to your readers. 

4. It's commonly accepted (except in Switzerland) that serif fonts are
more readable -- especially at small sizes -- than sans-serif, so body
text is usually set in a serif font while titles are allowed to appear
[or open, or be displayed] in sans-serif.

That "common knowledge", though, is really only for PRINTED material;
for on-screen display, there's much less agreement, and many people
believe that sans-serif fonts are more legible on the screen, especially
at small sizes.

You might want to decide which side of the argument you're on before
choosing whether serif fonts will be in your titles or in your body
text.

5. If your users will be able to print your documents as well as view
them on-screen, try printing them yourself first, both on a printer that
has the font you're using (if you can find one) and on a printer that
doesn't have the font.  The "boring" fonts always print nicely; you'll
want to choose fonts that also do.

-Andrew

=== Andrew Warren  - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
=== Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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