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Subject:Re: On-line Help: Arial v. Times New Roman From:Chuck Martin <cmartin -at- SEEKERSOFT -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 22 Sep 1997 10:24:40 -0700
At 09:01 AM 9/22/97 -0600, you wrote:
>Ron D Rhodes wrote:
>"....a savvy HDK developer told me that, for on-line help,
>Times New Roman is harder to read than Arial.
>I consequently took a fresh look at my help file and now I
>think she might be right. Is she right?"
>
>I prefer the Verdana font. It is a sans serif font with letter
>forms and letter spacing optimized for on-screen viewing.
>You can download it without charge from Microsoft's web site.
>
Does the simple act of downloading it also give you the legal right to
distribute it to your paying customers? Because you have to, you know. If
you choose that font and users don't have it on their systems, the OS will
substitute whatever it belives is the closest fit--which may not be
anything you could envision! You also have to add that file space to you
distrubution disks and make sure the font is installed correctly on all
users' systems, which means more QA time for the product.
Once again, MS Sans Serif is a professionally-created font that was
specifically designed for the 96-120 dpi world of screen displays. Every
normal install of Windows has this font.
One other advantage: Verdana, like most of the other fonts mentioned here,
are outline fonts (typically either True Type or PostScript). To display
outline fonts on the screen, the OS calls a rendering engine, which then
creates the specific lettering in the size and weight desired on the fly.
Screen fonts, such as MS Sans Serif, provide available lettering in
specific sizes. As a result, text appears faster on the screen. (Word uses
MS Sans Serif for its draft mode. See how much faster it is to work that
way and you'll see what I mean.)
--
"You don't look American"
"Everyone looks American, because Americans are from everywhere"
- Doonesbury
Chuck Martin
Technical Writer, Seeker Software, Inc | Personal
cmartin -at- seekersoft -dot- com | writer -at- grin -dot- net
www.seekersoft.com | www.grin.net/~writer
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