[scribus] Need Arial, Times New Roman Font "equivalents" to look/print nice in PDF

John Culleton john at wexfordpress.com
Wed Feb 23 17:25:01 CET 2011


On Tuesday 22 February 2011 05:51:56 Hirwen HARENDAL wrote:
> > From: drwforums at drwsoftware.com
> >
> > Producing a 48 page magazine and am having
> > trouble when producing a PDF.
> >
> > The small 7 pt Arial fonts look bad.
>
> ** Are they embedded or vectorized ? For the last I and L could
> look bad, but the printing works fine.
>
> > Currently, I am only using Times New Roman and Arial TT.
>
> Beside the use of fonts, there is a symbol in visual terms.Sure
> Times/Arial is a couple the most used since the computer age; but
> is not an heresy. Now, with DTP, the choise of the fonts is made
> depending of the kind of thedocument and what will be the reader
> target. That explains several couples existinglike Futura/bodoni,
> GillSans/Garamond, Frustiger/Caslon, etc. Sure, it's possible to
> change one of them. frustiger/caslon was used for journalism, but
> frustiger/baskervillewas prefered for business newspaper.
> Sociologia:Helvetica is prefered by americans, where is Arial in
> Europe, but Gillsans in England, grotesk in germany. Russians and
> East europ like Slabserif or mecane, etc. AdvertisingSame rules are
> applied with advertising, try to see by yourself around you.premium
> and luxury advertising use didones, especialy for perfume for
> ladies, butwill become sans serif like gillsans for young women,
> etc. I'm not agree to say: use this font or this one, because that
> depending more of yourdocument and your readers, rather than the
> font is nice. I'm preparing a article about this but in french...
> Regards
> Hirwen
>
>
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There is however this fact that everyone seems to be skipping over. 
Times (New) Roman is an extremely narrow font designed for newspaper 
columns. In a book unless it is used in a fairly large point size the 
number of characters per line will be excessive. People read not 
letter by letter or word by word but by line segment. Fluent readers 
(I used to be one) will have only two or three eye movements per line 
of text.  But that presumes a number of words small enough to be 
comprehended at a single glance. If you have a smaller point size (say 
8 points) and a decent sized measure (say 5 inches) there will be too 
many characters per line which in turn will upset normal eye movement.  
   
-- 
John Culleton
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