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From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.text
Subject: Re: Recommendations on buying an Adobe typeface?
Message-ID: <38640@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 14 Feb 90 18:21:34 GMT
References: <1914@lafcol.UUCP>
Organization: Fictional Reality: where your dreams can come true
Lines: 54

buyskes@lafcol.UUCP (Steven Buyske) writes:

>I'd like to suggest owners of one of
>the Adobe typefaces beyond the LW+ set post a note about what they like
>about it and why, and what they use it for.  I think we should pay
>particular attention to how they look at 300dpi resolution.

>For a text
>face people have recommended New Baskerville and Lucida. Any
>recommendations?  Garamond is also trendy, but is rumored to lose its
>flavor at 300dpi.  Any experience out there?

Typefaces are fun. (speaking of cheap typefaces, anyone else notice that 
Adobe is going to be bundling a bunch of their display faces into new,
lower-cost packages? Fun stuff).

I use two text faces a lot: ITC Garamond and ITC Galliard. Garamond is a
really nice, distinctive font. It's best on a high resolution imagesetter,
but I don't think it really loses anything at 300dpi at 12 points or more.
If you need to put a lot of text into a relatively small area, it's compact
without being unreadable. I use Garamond at 10pt a lot, which isn't really
fair to the typeface, but I think even at that size, while it loses some of
it's appeal, it's still an improvement over Times Roman. Other pluses for
garamond: it's got a very strong boldface that shows up and doesn't wash out
under Xerography. It's italic is acceptable, even in relatively large chunks.

Galliard Roman is another nice text face. I think it's a better face at 10pt
than Garamond, but it's got a much weaker bold face that essentially
disappears under Xerography (on the other hand, I switched over to using
small caps instead of bold, which is one less face to download and I think
is a reasonable alternative). The italic is, frankly, really ugly at 300dpi
and is unreadable at smaller than 12pt for more than a word or two. I've got
an occaisonal block of italic in OtherRealms that I had to move to 12pt just
to make it minimally readable. If you make heavy use of bold or italic,
Galliard's probably not a great choice.

For display faces, I've used a lot of Univers (and condensed Univers). I
find it just different enough from Helvetica to be distinctive without
calling attention to itself, but it's still a good, solid san serif. I'm
currently using some Benguiat as well and I like it as a headline face
better than Univers for things that don't need to be quite as formal. I've
tried Friz Quadrata, and it was okay, but I prefer Benguiat.

I find that neither Futura or Optima (sigh) work well at all at 300dpi.
At that resolution, they're only distant cousins of the typefaces I want to
work with. Optima's subtleties just defeat a laser printer. 


-- 

Chuq Von Rospach   <+>   chuq@apple.com   <+>   [This is myself speaking]

Rumour has it that Larry Wall, author of RN, is a finalist in the race for
the Nobel Peace Prize for his invention of the kill file.