David J Brooks wrote: >On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 12:14 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> If there was one thing I'd change in the 2011 Annual it would be the size of >> the font - I find it a little hard to read with my old eyes! > >Same here. I had a hard time reading some of the items.
All right. Lemme tell ya a story about fonts... OK, first of all, my eyes are approaching their 50th birthday next month and I think you're right that the print could be a bit larger. Mea culpa. We'll do better next year, etc. Good lighting helps and should be a consideration when viewing any art book but it would still be nice for us old folks to be able to read it in our living room in the evening. Now on to the story (which isn't directly related to the above but I'm taking the chance to veer off-topic - consider it a segue). I took about a month going through fonts when selecting one for this year's book. Size aside, it is pretty nice, isn't it? Not too formal or too casual; artistic but not off the wall. Well, I like it. Being budget-minded I chose a freeware font, but I was careful to go for one that (I thought) had everything I needed. Last year I did my "Loire Valley Travels" book and chose a wonderful font for it... only to discover after getting the book almost completed that it didn't have a bold or italic version. As it happened, I didn't need bold for my body text and very few words were italicized, so I went for the (typographically cheesy) solution of pseudo-italic skewed text in the few spots I wanted italic. Even my friend who teaches Typography I and Typography II at the college didn't notice. For the PDML book I made sure I chose a font that had bold and italic versions. Only when the book was nearly completed did I notice the small size issue (everything is readable on a big monitor with magnification set for detail work - and here's some trivia: Some fonts at 10-point size are much, much smaller than other fonts at the same nominal point size; this shouldn't be true but it is), at which point changing would have required a massive re-organization of many pages. But there was a much more serious issue to address: Have you noticed that some PDML members have the temerity to have names that use non-English characters? The nerve! The font I'd chosen did indeed have the letters "e" and "a" with accents, but not the letter "c" (Luka Kneevic-Strika I'm looking at YOU!) The letter "O" with slash, as in Øksne and Øsleby was also absent. No Copyright symbol either. It did, however, have all the characters necessary to spell "panic" in English. I could have gone for another font, but that would have necessitated a lot of re-juggling: I'd already spent time on kerning of some sections and making sure page and line breaks occurred at the right spots. And I still liked the look of the font. So I ended up buying font editing software and creating the necessary characters myself. A bit time (and money) consuming, but very satisfying. Another lesson learned for next year's book. -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
