laser-lovers@uw-beaver (06/04/85)
From: Les Earnest <LES@SU-AI.ARPA>
Inasmuch as it has been over two weeks since the abortive "blind tasting"
of fonts here, I think that an update is in order. As you may recall
from my "Blind tasting partial results" [17 May 85 1642 PDT], we were
planning to solicit print samples for a more systematic tasting.
The following Friday we discussed the matter further and started formulating
print sample specifications. In response to my message on "Evaluating the
tastes of others" [23 May 85 0007 PDT], a consensus formed in favor of
collecting individual tasting notes rather than reporting consensus
evaluations.
I argued that these notes should be edited by someone to reduce
redundancy, but was not sufficiently persuasive. As things stand there is
to be full disclosure by all participants. Shy types may use pseudonyms,
as in CB land ("Hi there, this is Sans Serif Susan southbound on a
14 point font!")
Last Friday we reviewed a candidate print sample and Richard Southall
agreed to create a better one. For the first round we plan to solicit just
Times Roman (or pseudo-Times Roman) samples in three sizes: 8, 10, and 12
points. We plan to distribute a text sample via Laser-Lovers in four source
versions: plain text, troff, TeX, and Scribe. It will be necessary for
contributors to do some minor fiddling of the sources in order to get them
to print in the right font.
Print samples will be received here and cataloged by Lynn Ruggles, who
will mark each one with a unique, nonsequential identifier and organize
the samples for tastings. We also plan to retain the samples in notebook
form for later review.
We hope to get the sampling message out this week.
Cheers,
Les Earnest
Stanford