laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/20/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> I've had a wine tasting at my house every Monday night for several years. One of the things that I have noticed is that people can often recognize particular wines. From time to time one of the winemakers shows up, and they always dazzle us with their ability not only to recognize their own wines, but to tell one year from another. One person owns many hundreds of bottles of wine from a certain winery, and he can almost always detect that wine in these tastings. Whether he *prefers* it is a separate issue from whether he can *recognize* it. Similarly, I suspect that I could recognize, by brand name, the output of this or that laser printer, and this or that text formatter, for a reasonably large number of printers and text formatters. I'm not as scholarly as Chuck Bigelow on these matters--I could never manage to tell who the 16th-century Italian designer of some font might have been--but I can normally spot Xerox or Imagen or Apple/Adobe or Talaris/QMS output, even if I don't know whether I am looking at Times New Roman or Optima. I would guess that the people in Les Earnest's group can do this too. Some of them probably have pretty good eyes for this kind of detail. And therein lies the problem. Given that most experts in this field can *recognize* the output of their own systems, and thereby pretend to *prefer* it if they so choose, and given the nature of the accusations Les has been making, it is very important to have comparisons like this made by disinterested third parties. Even if the people doing this "blind comparison" have no financial interest in any of the products being tested, there is a tremendous amount of interaction between people at Stanford and the various laser printer companies, and there are going to be plenty of folks who are quite partial even without owning stock in Imagen or Adobe or Apple or QMS or Xerox. It is my understanding (I'm sure that Les will correct me if I am wrong) that Imagen was founded by a bunch of people who left Stanford (primarily from the TEX group) to sell commercially a laser printer whose initial prototypes were made in the basement of the Stanford CS department by folks in that research group. If that is true, then I claim that a "blind tasting" by members of that group is not an impartial tasting, and that Les therefore did exactly the right thing by keeping the results private. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/20/85)
From: Howard Trickey <trickey@diablo> I took place in Les's font tasting, and I don't think impartiality was much of an issue. I don't use either of the printers involved, and though I'd seen output from them, I didn't recognize their output. I think the same is true for a number of the other participants; most of those that do use one or other of the printers probably never use the Times Roman font on them. And remember, Les asked those who recognized either printer to disqualify themselves. The reason that several people voiced objections to publicizing the results was that it would in effect be a commercial endorsement, and one based on not enough information. (By the way, this objection was raised before the tasting, and while we didn't definitely decide not to release results until afterwards, the decision wasn't made because anyone didn't like the way the group preference came out.) It may have been that at a different point size the decision would have been reversed. I feel that my own preference was due partly to the poor character placement given by one formatter/printer combination, and thus not completely due to a "font" preference. Another issue is that some believe it is often not possible to say that one font is "better" than another; it depends on what use is being made of them. One of the participants made the point that we were all studying the individual character forms rather closely, not reading a large body of text, so we weren't making normal use of the fonts. Howard Trickey Stanford