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From: briand@tekig4.UUCP (Brian Diehm)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Boston font
Message-ID: <407@tekig4.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Nov-85 13:10:53 EST
Article-I.D.: tekig4.407
Posted: Tue Nov 19 13:10:53 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 05:38:14 EST
References: <480@harvard.ARPA> <1087@arthur.purdue.UUCP>
Reply-To: briand@tekig4Diehm.UUCP (Brian Diehm)
Distribution: net
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 35
Summary: 

In article <1087@arthur.purdue.UUCP> sbm@purdue.UUCP (Steven B. Munson) writes:

>     Just one other thing--I was surprised to see that, even though
>Pellucida follows all the rules of readability (at least those
>mentioned in the article; I'm no expert), I consider it to be kind of
>ugly-looking.  I guess there is a difference between readability and
>good looks.  I would welcome further comments; I find this intriguing
>after taking for granted the fonts I see every day.

Actually, the example of Pellucida does NOT follow all the rules they state.
Furthermore, I thik Pellucida, at least from the examples they show in the
article, is totally unreadable.  Some of the specific examples of improvements
actually make the silly thing harder to read.

A few years ago I heard a talk by representatives of a major type-designing
house in Germany.  I came away convinced that the human factors associated
with typeface design are complex, often counter-intuitive, and generally make
the whole discipline an art form.  The attitude of these people was that
Donald Knuth, and the tex/metafont system, revealed the depth of their in-
norance in the field.  I've noticed more recently that Douglas Hofstadter
(sp?) has discussed this, but has more cautiously limited himself pretty much
to revealing the depth and dimensions of the problem.

The impression I got from the MacWorld article was that these people are very
eager and able - but they're amateurs.  That doesn't mean they won't be quite
successful someday, but the examples they showed and the principles they laid
out are either extremely fundamental, or just plain wrong.

The alternate possibility is that their work will be successful, and the very
concept held by society of letter forms will evolve in their directions.  I
personally think the computers should evolve in our direction, not the other
way around!

-Brian Diehm
Tektronix, Inc. (which corporation doesn't design typefaces!)