Optima, and humanist sans, Comic Sans was An alternative history

On 29 Aug 2006 22:40:39 -0700 in alt.folklore.computers, "toby"

Bitstream's fonts always seemed to look better than the others, despite their seeming reliance on fitting Beziers to bitmaps; maybe they were really good at running and tuning the process. I've never liked Adobe's fonts since they first appeared on LaserWriters, nor their recent Acrobat renderings: either too light or too heavy, too tight or too loose, mostly light and tight! GhostScript renders PDFs for display and print more pleasantly (but is a pain for search or cut-paste, so hang on to your Acrobat Reader) and also handles PS, which Acrobat Reader doesn't: duh! Who invented that PDL again?

ISTM Syntax looks like a headline-poster version of Gill Sans1. The forms look too curvy and similar for easy reading, but good for creating pleasing geometric patterns, perhaps more calligraphic, if I can use that term about a sans face, whereas Gill Sans seems to emphasize the differences between the letters, making it more suitable for body text. Reading the design background for both fonts, they seem to have taken similar inspiration from humanist and old style fonts, but come up with totally different looking results. But then, I'm not too fond of monoline even weight fonts, perhaps because of previous experience. A PPoE was bought by a pipeline company and to properly label our graphic output, I had to recreate the company logo and pipe-like typeface *to legal spec* using only function and cursor keys on a colour graphic 3270 mainframe terminal (locally attached!) No detailed glyph information was available: used an enlarging copier on corporate letterhead a few times to accurately measure the weights and proportions. At least the font creation package had decent cloning features: created the more complex characters, cloned them, deleted lines-curves, patched up the result; rinse, repeat.

Couldn't see any sign of the serif version on their site -- removed?

Article for Steve Richfield on "Typography and the Aging Eye":

1 IMHO the second great sans typeface (following Gill's teacher Edward Johnston's popularization of the style for the London Underground) used for those long Welsh railway station signs. Used to buy LetraSet transfer sheets of Gill Sans when I was young and they were relatively expensive, because I really liked the glyph forms, and used them for labelling self-bound magazine volumes, despite heavy handedness in application of the transfers. (N.B. Frutiger was designed for Charles de Gaulle Airport signs: there seems to be a connection here between the amount of research done on type designs for transportation purposes and the eventual success of the design in typography.)

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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