RE: Reasons not to use the Courier font

["Brierley, Sean" <Brierley -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

Hallo:

I like the Gill Sans fonts, too, but had to dump 'em cos I couldn't get the
TrueType versions to work with Adobe Acrobat and the PDF creation process.
Neither could Adobe Tech Support. Arlen, are you using the PostScript
iterations of Gill Sans?

I prefer to keep my fonts to a core of four, including Symbol. Folks where I
work seem to love the Comic Sans font, for which I have absolutely no use.
Indeed, I deleted it from my system but had to reinstall it because I
couldn't read the majority of incoming e-mail. I choose 2 sans-serif fonts
and a serif, to round out. I keep these mainstream, so as not to crash
Adobe--I'm working in TrueType. My predecessors used about 12 fonts for the
same docs for which I now use four. I like to keep my technical docs
simpler. The docs are not about fonts and I don't want a mess of fonts
distracting my reader and destroying readability.

As for serif versus sans: I have heard all the stories and have never seen a
study that was worth a thing. Serif is pretty common in the UK. Maybe only
Switzerland prefers sans serif? In any event, I've not seen any meaningful
data, only tenth-hand references to such studies as being important. I
prefer, instead, to use few fonts, keep the fonts clear, use white space
efficiently, and keep line lengths manageable, etc.

I'd be up for reading an original study on serif versus sans that made a
strong case either way . . . are there any on the web?

Oh, courier. I use it to reproduce screen text only. It's a horrible font
that is difficult to read because it doesn't flow. It should be reserved
only for the ALL-CAPS CROWD.

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com