Font choices & prices (was Re: [clue-tech] gimp fonts for [printed] graphics)

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 12:35:51 -0700
Matt Gushee wrote:

> Like you really wanted to know all this ;-)

Well, actually, yes. I tend to try to pay attention to the how well a font
works for a particular purpose. For example, my current resume I use, yes,
Times New Roman, because it seemed the best of what I had available to me
the last time I did major work on it. There are various reasons why I
don't mess with it (my resume) to that degree now. But, in the past, for a
while, I was fortunate to have a friend doing it for me. She was, by
trade, and  electronic typesetter, and had all the cool toys attendent to
that occupation. There's little point in my trying to remember the font
she used, because it was in that category of high-end stuff that I doubt
I'd ever consider buying. But it looked much better than TNR. I should
also note that if a recruiter is insisting on getting a Word document,
there's little point in choosing a font that isn't likely to be found on
the recuiter's computer -- in fact, it can be counterproductive because of
spacing problems which might occur when font substitution is done. Thus,
we wind up using the lowest common denominator, or close to it. I'd never
use Courier or Helvetica, for example. But back in those old days, when
resumes where printed and maild or carried in, you could actually wind up
with something much nicer.

I have to say that my general choice these days are the Bitstream Vera
fonts < http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ >. Nice looking, IMHO. How they rate
in terms of quality hinting, etc. I don't know. The only glitch I've
noticed is that there's a name field someplace in the font file, and in
the initial release (I'm assuming they've fixed this), they dropped an r,
and so I have "bitsteam" -- now that's a hot font! There was some
complaint on the gnome-fonts mailing list about missing glyphs, and IIRC
the reply was something like, "They're open source, so add them if you
want to".

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier