[comp.windows.ms] Gill Sans

wdr@wang.com (William Ricker) (03/26/91)

tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:

>That GillSans supplied with Adobe Type Manager 1.1 is a pretty weird
>font, isn't it! 

Glad to hear GillSans is being bundled.  (I wish the foundry type I'm
picking up (approx. 30 Lbs) today were GillSans rather than Futura,
but I can't quibble at salvage prices.)

> I hate the tiny x-height as far as 300dpi printing goes.  

I haven't played with GillSans, but I sould guess at 300dpi you don't
want to try small  point-sizes.   How does it look on a linotronic?

> Doesn't it look like the face the Brits use on their street and
>tube signs and a lot of their adverts?

Yes.

Eric Gill was the apprentice to the type designer (whose name I forget)
who  designed the face for the London Metro (tube stations).  Gill Sans
does bear a *very* strong resemblence to the Metro face, but Gill denied
any connection between his Sans face and his master's Metro.  I suppose
it is possibly as overused in Britain as Helvetica, Courier, and Times are
in the States, but I wasn't attuned to such things when I was there.
   [Source: a poster on type families, probably distributed by Adobe but
maybe by CG or BitStream, that hangs in our human factors lab.]
-- 
/bill ricker/
wdr@wang.com a/k/a wricker@northeastern.edu
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