Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!leichter
From: leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU))
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: why are all books Times Roman ?
Message-ID: <62985@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jun 89 00:47:57 GMT
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
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X-from: leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU))

In article <485@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>, stevens@hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens) writes...
>Why are almost all technical books done in Times Roman these days ?
>Going through my bookshelf, other than Knuth's books,
>almost everything seems to be in Times Roman....
> 
>I think the Times family on our LaserWriters look pretty bad.
>Is this endemic to the LW, or should I expect the same font on
>a high-resolution PostScript typesetter to look better ?
> 
>What's the reason for this addiction to Times Roman ?  Going through
>the Adobe Font catalog, there appear to be more readable serif fonts
>with the characters just a little wider.  (My main complaint about
>Times is that it looks so squeezed.)  Do publishers like Times
>because it uses a fewer number of pages ?  Is it just history ?
>I note the Chicago Manual of Style says that few typefaces other
>than Times Roman have all the necessary characters necessary for
>technical typesetting, but a *lot* has happened in the area of
>type fonts since 1982.

To quote Charles Bigelow's introduction to "Computer Modern Typefaces":

	Typography is a conservative art:  The style that is called
	"modern" in English typographic terminology is two hundred
	years old.

Type design is inseperable from printing technology.  The Times family has
too much fine detail to work well on 300 dpi laser printers.  But that is,
of course, of no interest to printers with access to high-quality typesetting
equipment.

The latest typographic technology is only about 10 years old.  The first full
professional font designed "for the modern age" (Bigelow's Lucida) is half
that.  It will take time for the new ideas to become accepted.  (But they are
getting there - Scientific American is now typeset in Lucida.  Personally, I
can't say I like it much - months of reading have made it familiar, but I
still prefer whatever SA used to use.  Ah, well, an old fogey at 35 and it's
not even my field.... :-) )
							-- Jerry