bonham@calgary.UUCP (Michael Bonham) (07/16/88)
I'm posting this to both comp.text and comp.fonts because comp.fonts is currently full of somebody's private flame wars and I wouldn't blame anyone for unsubscibing for a while (thereby missing my original query). I would greatly appreciate any pointers or info on the history and aesthetics of digital type designs. The two I know of are Knuth's "Computer Modern" and Bigelow & Holmes' "Lucida" families of type fonts. A few times I've seen comments on these font families on the net. The gist of them were: The revised CMR fonts with Tex82 are much MUCH better than the originals released with TeX78. (showing that one can change the font & keep the name!). Knuth had considerable typographical knowledge & sense when he invented cmr; nonetheless the original cmr was considered deficient, even ugly in some ways -- I believe with respect to letter spacing & proportions. Expert typographers went over them for TeX82 and supposedly made great improvements. Bigelow & Holmes' Lucida was designed from the beginning for use with "medium-resolution" dot-matrix print engines (500-1000 dpi, or so), though it works on laser printers even as coarse as 300 dpi! As might be expected, some people still aren't turned on by Lucida, but most think it's wonderful. Does anyone have references to informed, critical reviews of typographical fonts especially designed for computer-driven printers and typesetters? Thank you very much. -- Mike Bonham