laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/23/85)
From: Chuck Bigelow <CAB@SU-AI.ARPA> The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, May 23, has a full page ad on page 36 with the headline: "Set your laser on stun." And then goes on to recommend the "knock 'em dead" qualities of the HP Laserjet and Microsoft Word, showing an example of a page printed on the Laserjet. Study of the typography of the ad reveals several interesting facts: 1) The actual advertising copy is set in Goudy Old Style, designed by America's home-grown great, Fred Goudy, c. 1915 for American Typefounders (ATF). The semi-bold headline is set in a bolder weight which was most probably drawn by Morris Fuller Benton, the staff designer at ATF. This face is currently very popular in advertising typography, but to my knowledge does not appear on any commercial laser printer fonts. So much for Madison Avenue. You will note (if you read the ad) that the letterspacing of the Goudy text is quite tight, a common trait in advertising text. 2) The copy on the laser printed page is set mostly in the Timsrmn variant of Times Roman available on the Laserjet. The letterspacing is rather loose. Oddly enough, the superscripts and subscripts appear to be in Computer Modern, and the single word in sans-serif boldface appears to be Computer Modern Bold Sans-serif, rather than Helvetica. These things did, in some sense, stun me. Does anyone know how Computer Modern got mixed up with Times and Helvetica in the Laserjet font cartridges? This reminds me of a Xerox ad for laser printers, current some three years ago, that had a large headline in Bembo (not then offered on Xerox printers) but with a glaring "wrong font" lowercase `g' in Baskerville, a design created some 262 years later than the original of Bembo, and in another country (besides, the punch is dead). This error wasn't Xerox's font, but that of its ad agency that couldn't recognize a font error in an ad about typography. The version of Bembo with a Baskerville `g' is on a display font from the Visual Graphics corporation of Florida. It's probably still there.
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/29/85)
From: mtu!karl@Glacier (Karl Ottenstein) From postnews Fri May 24 19:05:43 1985 Subject: Re: Laser Stun Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers References: <7824@Glacier.ARPA> > The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, May 23, has a full page ad > on page 36 with the headline: > "Set your laser on stun." > And then goes on to recommend the "knock 'em dead" qualities > of the HP Laserjet and Microsoft Word, showing an example of a > page printed on the Laserjet. > > Study of the typography of the ad reveals several interesting facts: > > 2) The copy on the laser printed page is set mostly in the Timsrmn > variant of Times Roman available on the Laserjet. The letterspacing > is rather loose... I saw this ad too: my reaction was that the letterspacing was worse than loose...it was terrible. There have been complaints here about the LaserWriter/PostScript producing text where letters touch one another. I have been observing such text for some time now and have not seen this occurence...everything I have seen is gorgeous. The HP print sample in the ad has the opposite problem: the letters are so far apart that the words don't look like words! Karl Ottenstein Michigan Technological University uucp: {lanl, ihnp4, glacier}!mtu!karl arpa/csnet: karl%mtu@csnet-relay