Re: Online fonts and sizes -- a bit long

["Susan Patrick" <susan -dot- patrick -at- fti-ibis -dot- com>]

> Unfortunately, Television fonts and computer fonts are not similar and you
> do have to adjust to a completely different set of constraints when
thinking
> about them.  The physical display (square pixels versus rectangular pixels
> for NTSC) makes using the same fonts somewhat painstaking.  The viewing
> distance is also a consideration (7-9 feet is the norm, but different
sizes
> of TV screens even make this problematic). Finally, television resolution
is
> poor (an understatement).  Even though Television has been around for a
long
> time, typography for television is poorly understood and not very well
> mined.  Each company I have worked with in this industry develops their
own
> fonts or attempts to create a filter to change postscript and truetype
fonts
> to TV fonts.  What makes the development of these fonts worse is that they
> are developed on computers (and TV fonts look awful on computer displays).

Thanks for the explanation, Walden. I have always noticed that text
legibility decreases when PC games are ported to consoles, but yours is the
most thorough explanation I've found. Once I even saw an excellent game
(Omikron) rendered nearly unplayable by poor typography. The futuristic font
the designers used was almost completly unreadable on a TV screen, and much
of the player's progress in the game depended on being able to get clues
from various texts.

Susan Patrick




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