[comp.fonts] Adobe's List of Fonts for Faxing

briand@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM (Brian D Diehm) (04/14/90)

I mentioned on the net some time ago that Adobe had included a list of fonts
they had tested for faxing. It was included in the Font & Function catalog
just previous to the current one. At the encouragement of several people, I
am posting Adobe's list here. These are listed in Adobe's order from most to
least desirable for faxing:

 1 Lucida
 2 Lucida Sans
 3 ITC Stone Sans
 4 ITC Bookman Light
 5 Corona
 6 Utopia
 7 Frutiger
 8 Melior
 9 Century Expanded
10 News Gothic
11 Glypha
12 Clarendon

Adobe was singularly uninformative about how this test was run. They implied
that they chose 12 typefaces to test, and then did the test. They did say that
they used blind polling to evaluate the results among the 12. They did not say
what size type they sent across.

Most bothersome to me is the lack of explanation of their original choices.
Were they selected at random from the more than 500 faces in the Adobe collec-
tion? Or was there some reason that these would theoretically be good faces to
try? Or, as implied in the e-mail I've appended below, did Adobe just decide
to try out what they wanted to sell that month?

Adobe did show the test results printed on the page, and I certainly must say
that Clarendon CLEARLY should NOT be used for faxing. All of which makes the
original criteria for selection more important. Thus, I place only limited
value on Adobe's list.

The e-mail below comes from a truly jaundiced eye, though it has merit:

------------------------ included e-mail --------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 90 21:05:53 -0500
From: Rob Elliott <cs325bp@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
To: briand@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM
Subject: Re: What Fonts are Good for FAX
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana

Notice how their chart didn't even try Courier or Times (which are built
in to every PS printer).  I think their choices were mainly based on which
fonts they wanted to advertise.  Then they make it look (if you don't
read carefully) like these are the best fax fonts of their whole catalog.
Neat little trick.

rob elliott
---------------------- end of included e-mail ---------------------------------

In Adobe's defense, Bookman Light placed fourth and is included in almost all
LaserWriters today - it simply wasn't part of the original LaserWriter from
Adobe/Apple.

As a final note, I think that the Lucida block letterforms, and their requisite
very loose letter packing, make it clear that Lucida is even in theory going
to do very well for fax. I personally can't stand to READ it, understand. . .

-Brian Diehm
Tektronix, Inc.                (503) 627-3437         briand@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM
P.O. Box 500, M/S 47-561
Beaverton, OR   97077                        (SDA - Standard Disclaimers Apply)
-- 
-Brian Diehm
Tektronix, Inc.                (503) 627-3437         briand@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM
P.O. Box 500, M/S 47-561
Beaverton, OR   97077                        (SDA - Standard Disclaimers Apply)