brown@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com (Kevin Brown) (03/30/91)
Does anyone know of any tests or research that trys to measure how well a font will hold up to FAXing? Got any suggestions on which of the 35 'standard' postscript fonts would be best? Would there be an ideal point size to match the resolution of FAX? Kevin Brown HP Boise
rob@lighthouse.com (Rob Kedoin) (04/01/91)
This was posted some time last year and answers most of your questions.
Rob Kedoin rob@lighthouse.com
Lighthouse Design, Ltd
6516 Western Avenue Chevy Chase, MD 20815
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From: jeynes@adobe.COM (Ross A. Jeynes)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Answers about fax fonts
Date: 15 May 90 23:31:27 GMT
Reply-To: jeynes@adobe.COM (Ross A. Jeynes)
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
There have been some messages on the net lately about Adobe's recommendations
for fonts and faxing. Our article in the Fall 1989 issue of the Font &
Function catalog seems to have fallen short in its explanation of the test we
ran to arrive at our choice of fonts. This message is a clarification of that
article, and provides some additional recommendations.
The test originated from a customer's request to purchase Adobe fonts that
would fax well. We turned to a member of the typographic staff for a quick,
well-informed, response. Her approach was to select typefaces that had been
designed specifically for legibility, ranging from Clarendon, designed in the
1840s, to Utopia, designed in 1989. She also wanted to compare typefaces with
small and large x-heights, serif and sans serif designs, and a designs with a
range of set widths, (character widths).
A test set of twelve typefaces was selected. A business letter was printed
twelve times, once in each typeface. All letters were printed at 11-point on
a LaserWriter II-NTX. At 300-dpi resolution, 11-point type is far more
legible than 10-point, while conserving more space than 12-point.
The printed letters were then faxed twice, once between two local sites and
once between Boston and Mountain View, California. There were very slight
differences between the two sets, but the overall color of the text and the
quality of the letterforms remained the same.
The faxes were then posted on a bulletin board, and 30 people cast hidden
ballots ranking all twelve typefaces for clarity, legibility, and
readability.
The typefaces, in order of preference, are:
Lucida
Lucida Sans
ITC Stone Sans
ITC Bookman Light
Corona
Utopia
Frutiger
Melior
Century Expanded
News Gothic
Glypha
Clarendon
As a follow-up Adobe has done a similar test for the typefaces resident in
most laser printers (both Adobe PostScript and PostScript-clone printers).
Again, the business letter was printed once in each of the typefaces and set
at 11-point. The faxed letters were voted upon for clarity, legibility, and
readability.
In order of preference, the typefaces are:
Palatino
Helvetica
ITC Bookman Light
New Century Schoolbook
Courier
Times Roman
ITC Avant Garde
ITC Zapf Chancery
Ross Jeynes
Developer Support jeynes@adobe.com
Adobe Systems Incorporated {sun|decwrl}!adobe!jeynestneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) (04/01/91)
For what it's worth, I usually fax in about Helvetica 13. Serifs and small x-heights tend to be hard to read if there's any significant degradation of the fax image. There also seems to be a break point somewhere between 12 and 13 points where the final document retains a professional look. It depends on your recipients' tastes and on your average transmission quality.
steve@thelake.mn.org (Steve Yelvington) (04/02/91)
[In article <25321801@bfmny0.BFM.COM>,
tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes ... ]
> For what it's worth, I usually fax in about Helvetica 13. Serifs and
> small x-heights tend to be hard to read if there's any significant
> degradation of the fax image. There also seems to be a break point
> somewhere between 12 and 13 points where the final document retains a
> professional look. It depends on your recipients' tastes and on your
> average transmission quality.
We (my employer, actually) published a fax newspaper for awhile before it
became obvious that it wasn't going to make any money. We had no trouble
at all using Times Roman at 9.5. The bottleneck on fax quality is the
scanning device, and since we weren't using one, even inexpensive fax
machines were able to reproduce the paper without trouble. We generated
faxable bitmaps using GammaScript (an OEM version of Ultrascript) from
PostScript files created by Pagemaker. The bitmaps were transmitted
directly by a fax board.
Our competition typeset their fax edition, pasted it up, and fed it into a
conventional fax machine. I think they were running 12pt Helv and their
quality was significantly lower than ours.
----
Steve Yelvington / P. O. Box 38 / Marine on St. Croix, MN 55047 USA
INTERNET: steve@thelake.mn.org UUCP: plains!umn-cs!thelake!steve
GEnie: S.YELVINGTO2 Delphi: YELVINGTON