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Subject:Disregard my msg on typefaces-it's repetitious From:Linda Wolf <tscom010 -at- DUNX1 -dot- OCS -dot- DREXEL -dot- EDU> Date:Fri, 5 Nov 1993 10:17:41 EST
>Bonni/e,
>It sounds like you're primarily concerned with paper-based documents,
>and there are plenty of issues to address there. Are you also thinking
>of online versions of the same documents? If there's any chance that
>your docs will be network-accessible or published on other media
>(like disk or CD-ROM), on-screen readability is also a big
>consideration.
>A few years ago we converted from TeX to Frame on the Mac (whew!),
>and adopted Times and Helvetica as our default style. Then we
>formed a style committee that comprised corporate marketing,
>pubs, and training, and spent about 9 months hashing out a new
>corporate style. We chose the Bembo family for our standard font,
>primarily because it looks good and crisp, and its very
>readable on paper.
>But we forgot to consider a biggie. We put most of our documents on
>servers so customers can download them, and online docs have to be in
>ascii or some generic font that just about any platform can use
>(read Times and Helvetica here, *the* universal fonts). We
>use Macs, and apparently when you create a PostScript file, the
>Mac includes the entire font set with the file itself. So we had
>huge files that were too big or took too long to download over
>the net, and in some cases they were too big for customers to
>open when they *did* get them downloaded.
>So we went back to Times/Helvetica to accomodate the downloadable
>versions. Unfortunately, Times is *very* hard to read on a
>console or display screen. If it weren't for Frame's ability
>to display pages at greater-than-normal scale, I'd be about blind
>by now.
>And now the fun is *really* about to begin; we'll have all of our
>docs published on CD-ROM in about a month or so. The documents
>use our new standard, Times/Helvetica, but the search & display engine
>on the CD-ROM lets users change the text to their font of choice.
>So, in a nutshell, our rally for readability had to take a back
>seat to accomodate electronic files and network access. Paper is
>no longer the default; our style is in a constant state of flux
>to accomodate the newest media types. Anyway, it's something to
>keep in mind if you're looking at font properties and readability.
>kb
>Kathy Barreto
>barreto -at- cisco -dot- com
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Linda Wolf
Drexel University
tscom010 -at- dunx1 -dot- ocs -dot- drexel -dot- edu
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