Font Fanatic

[EricKei]

I read this line and just picture a "font geek" opening a book ....

I know someone like this. I did some editing for him on a fan-translation of an old game. He agonized for hours over which specific font to use in certain dialogue boxes x.x I think he ended up just designing his own. He works for a newspaper now, so I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is.

On the upside, tho...it was worth it. Came out really nice

He's also one hell of a programmer, and one of those people who can look at a game's (compiled) code and have it worked out in no time flat, so I let it slide

[Ill_Used_Heroine]

I used to be a typographer, back before it was an obsolete trade. I loved that job, but I hated the customers who would come in, give us unmarked copy and instead of picking out a font from our huge list, they'd say "don't worry, I trust your judgement ... just make it look good, ok?" and then when they came in to pick up the mechanicals, they'd be "THIS ISN'T WHAT I WANTED!!!!ELEVENTY!!!"

Yep, good times. Though, I do really miss that job.

[sirwired]

I learned all about typography when working on the high school literary magazine. And this was "old-school" layout, where we worked with razor blades, wax, light boxes, and registration markers. We did have a laser printer, so this was not the complete stone-age here...

I remember spending long afternoons hunched over the light box, my fingers burned from our cheap-ass wax machine, squinting to read the marks on my handy pica ruler.

It's amazing what you can accomplish by adjusting kerning settings (kerning is the practice of nesting letters together that have the room, like tucking a "y" underneath a "T") or making subtle adjustments to line spacing...

Even now, coming on 20 years later, I still read the Colophon in books and magazines that still have them.

SirWired

[XCashier]

So long as the font is simple and readable I'm fine.

Same here. Don't most books use Times New Roman or something similar anyway?

[sirwired]

Same here. Don't most books use Times New Roman or something similar anyway?

No. Different publishers use different fonts, but I guarantee few, if any, of them use Times New Roman. Most (but not all) use a serif font of some sort, but that is where the similarity ends.

The font selected for a book is going to be very different from the font used in a short Word document. It has to be optimized to balance readability, space usage, the printing process used, the paper type, the audience of the book and the subject matter.

I once read a fascinating article about changes to the DOT standard font used in highway signs. By making subtle changes to the shape of the letters, the kerning and the letter spacing, they were able to increase the distance a sign could be read by something like 35%. The amazing thing is that unless you held the two fonts next to each other, you would be hard-pressed to be positive there was even a difference.

SirWired

[mikoyan29]

I helped my mom with Pagemaker when she was taking a typography class. She also had to do it the old fashioned way. It was pretty interesting stuff.

I remember while I was taking typing class, we had a couple lessons where we had to justify our text. If I remember correctly that required looking at the number of letters on the line and then working out the spacing so that they would come out to 80 (or whatever it was).

Kids these days and their fancy word processors...