Re: Once Again I Make Things Happen!

Mayor of R'lyeh wrote:
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:44:50 +0100, nospamatall <nospamatall@xxxxxx>
wrote:

Mayor of R'lyeh wrote:

If getting the exact look of fonts is important to you. Apple has
catered to the publishing industry and co developed their standards
with them. That's why Macs have professional printing has a
stronghold.
But still 99.99% of computer users couldn't give a rip less if their
'F's are a little wider than they should be and would prefer
readability to headache inducing exactness.
Whether they care or not is irrelevant. Over hundreds of years tpyeface
designers have learned what is most easy to read. Read some books on
typography before continuing with this. There is no need for a reader to
understand typography for typography to improve readability for that reader.

If you had read the entire thread you would see that my main point is
that by shoehorning Apple's font rendering onto Windows where it was
not designed to work they have greatly degraded the readability of the
fonts. It really doesn't matter how well they were displayed if the
method used to display them makes them look like you're trying to read
them through a piece of wax paper.

I have read it all so far. To me you seem to be not just saying that
safari's rendering on windows was bad, but that the underlying ideas
that apple use also on their own systems, are wrong. I use XP (well, not
much anymore) and OS X and to me the font rendering on OS X seems much
better overall.
It isn't really a matter of printing, its about display and readability,
on paper, on screen, anywhere.

Which is exactly my point. The use of fonts designed for print and a
method designed to preserve their look in print on a computer monitor
has lead to a loss in readability.

I disagree. The important thing is the shape of the letters,and
typographers lavish much attention on such details as the curves of the
serifs. Faces are primarily designed for readability, taking into
account things like the overall impression we want to achieve
(businesslike, refined, etc). How your brain interprets the shapes is
the same on screen or in print. The problem is not how to design for
screen or print, just how to design for readability, and then then it is
up to the medium to do its best to reproduce that.

Screens can't produce curves, so other things have to be done to improve
the perceived accuracy of the curves. Making a special font for the
screen abandoning the finer details is a cop-out, allowing lazy software
programmers to impose limitations on the presentation because they are
ignorant of the importance of those details. Humans are used to a high
quality of type, and it is up to the producers of our equipment and the
software that drives it to maintain that standard, not force us into
mediocrity just to make their job easier.

The medium does dictate some aspects to
a certain extent, but the principle is the same. You are reading type,
and a screen has a vastly lower resolution than a magazine.

This is a bit like George Graves' denial that he was a price tag snob.
First he would deny that he even noticed price and then he would
hector me about liking something because it cost so little. You and
ZnU keep saying it has nothing to do with print then use print to
justify what you are saying. Personally I think you're both parroting
the Mac party line without giving any real though to what you're
saying. I also think neither one of you saw how gawdawful the fonts
were in Safari 3.1 on Windows. If you had there's no way you would be
defending it.

I have not seen safari on windows and I was not arguing with what you
said about that, only with your broader attack on Apple's efforts at
font rendering, which I think take into account an understanding of
typography whereas MS's rendering is utilitarian in the least flattering
sense. Fine for writing code or emails.

This is why Apple takes notice of the publishing industry. Why ignore
the collective knowledge of a body of experts who have clearly improved
their field and have the ability to improve the experience of all your
users? Catering for the publishing industry enables that industry to
cater for your users.

No one said it was a bad thing. But using a method to display fonts
that grossly diminishes their readability is a bad idea no matter
what.

Very true. The overall shape of a word is more important to readability.
Individual letters are not even crucial, as many test have proved, suvh
as those where all letters except the first and last are scrambled, yet
the text is still just about readable. Having every pixel perfectly
black or white is not important. Apple's seems to me to be the best
compromise so far.

Andy
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Need help identifying font.
    ... Font is a container, typeface is a design. ... There is for example no difference between readability and legibility ...
    (comp.fonts)
  • Re: Have you read the Tcl 8.5 tutorial?
    ... good money in1931 for the design of a font that is friendly to human ... Times was specifically designed for newspapers and the "low" printing ... and this printing variant renders badly on screens. ...
    (comp.lang.tcl)
  • Re: problem with using position and float together?
    ... the reason for using the floats is so I can get multiple sections. ... I created these pages using Dreamweaver and that was the default. ... W3C Quality Assurance Tips for Webmasters: Care With Font Size ... For this year's list of worst design mistakes, ...
    (comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets)
  • Re: What do I do to my web site for MAC users be able to click on
    ... already ran the Design Checker before and fixed everything it brought up. ... You had suggested changing the font but it showed that it was a Web font ... proposed actually did fix the problem with the links? ... Options and on the General Tab change the Measurement units to pixels ...
    (microsoft.public.publisher.webdesign)
  • Re: Demi-Bold, Demibold, DEMIBOLD !!! demibold please
    ... For a serious font designer, it's like trying to compete with Chinese ... necessary to redraw all the letters, probably in Illustrator, to be ... Speaking as a typographer. ... Without getting nasty and naming "designers," effective design ain't ...
    (comp.fonts)