Path: utzoo!dciem!trigraph!bruce
From: bruce@trigraph.UUCP (Bruce Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Not everyone uses Times Roman
Message-ID: <462@trigraph.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jun 89 14:34:50 GMT
References: <461@trigraph.UUCP> <5006@umd5.umd.edu>
Reply-To: bruce@trigraph.UUCP (Bruce Freeman)
Organization: Trigraph Inc., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 27

Just as a followup on the faces used at my company:

>Arg! I'm very glad that I don't buy books typeset by your clients... Helvetica
>is a terrible font to try and read for more than a page... Of course there ARE
>some weird types who think Sans-serif fonts are the way to go (there are
>even some people who like that really ugly font that's based on arcs of circles
>whose name I forget).

I should mention that I can't recall ever seeing a book/novel using Helvetica,
the heavy weighting of Helvetica in my list is due to the fact that any
catalogue, price list, parts list, directory, etc. you pick up these days uses
that face (and we do a lot of that work). This has been gone over before in
this group but sans serif faces are generally thought to be more legible than
serif faces for those types of printed materials. We don't pick the faces,
designers do.

Of more interest was the serif faces in the list. Several people have sent me
email commenting on this or that face in the list or not on the list. This
seems to be part of the cycle with designers on which faces are "fashionable".
Some faces such as Times seem to be always in fashion while others, like
Palatino which nobody seemed to use several years ago, come and go in cycles.
In fact I have heard some people complaining about the heavy use of Palatino
nowadays and pushing some other serif face. It would be interesting to see
a list of the most used faces for the last 10 or 20 years and see which
faces rise and fall in the lists.
-- 
Bruce Freeman	Trigraph Inc., Toronto, Canada		utzoo!trigraph!bruce