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)