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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re:  impartiality in blind comparisons
Message-ID: <1188@uw-beaver>
Date: Sun, 19-May-85 19:21:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1188
Posted: Sun May 19 19:21:24 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 21-May-85 05:42:56 EDT
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Howard Trickey <trickey@diablo>

I took place in Les's font tasting, and I don't think impartiality was
much of an issue.  I don't use either of the printers involved, and
though I'd seen output from them, I didn't recognize their output.
I think the same is true for a number of the other participants;
most of those that do use one or other of the printers probably never
use the Times Roman font on them.  And remember, Les asked those who
recognized either printer to disqualify themselves.

The reason that several people voiced objections to publicizing the
results was that it would in effect be a commercial endorsement,
and one based on not enough information.  (By the way, this objection
was raised before the tasting, and while we didn't definitely decide
not to release results until afterwards, the decision wasn't made
because anyone didn't like the way the group preference came out.)
It may have been that at a different point size the decision would
have been reversed.  I feel that my own preference was due partly to
the poor character placement given by one formatter/printer combination,
and thus not completely due to a "font" preference.
Another issue is that some believe it is often not possible to say that one
font is "better" than another; it depends on what use is being made
of them.  One of the participants made the point that we were all
studying the individual character forms rather closely, not reading
a large body of text, so we weren't making normal use of the fonts.

		Howard Trickey
		  Stanford