Mark, I almost didn't make the font size comment as I didn't want to be
negative about anything related to the book in deference to all the time &
work you and your cohorts had put into it, but since others have chimed in I
feel better about having done so.
Still a very good work to show off the efforts of the members - thanks again
& again & again....
Kenneth Waller
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/kennethwaller
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Roberts" <m...@robertstech.com>
Subject: Re: My observations on the 2011 PDML ANnual
David J Brooks wrote:
On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 12:14 AM, <kwal...@peoplepc.com> wrote:
If there was one thing I'd change in the 2011 Annual it would be the size
of
the font - I find it a little hard to read with my old eyes!
Same here. I had a hard time reading some of the items.
All right. Lemme tell ya a story about fonts...
OK, first of all, my eyes are approaching their 50th birthday next
month and I think you're right that the print could be a bit larger.
Mea culpa. We'll do better next year, etc. Good lighting helps and
should be a consideration when viewing any art book but it would still
be nice for us old folks to be able to read it in our living room in
the evening.
Now on to the story (which isn't directly related to the above but I'm
taking the chance to veer off-topic - consider it a segue).
I took about a month going through fonts when selecting one for this
year's book. Size aside, it is pretty nice, isn't it? Not too formal
or too casual; artistic but not off the wall. Well, I like it.
Being budget-minded I chose a freeware font, but I was careful to go
for one that (I thought) had everything I needed. Last year I did my
"Loire Valley Travels" book and chose a wonderful font for it... only
to discover after getting the book almost completed that it didn't
have a bold or italic version. As it happened, I didn't need bold for
my body text and very few words were italicized, so I went for the
(typographically cheesy) solution of pseudo-italic skewed text in the
few spots I wanted italic. Even my friend who teaches Typography I and
Typography II at the college didn't notice.
For the PDML book I made sure I chose a font that had bold and italic
versions. Only when the book was nearly completed did I notice the
small size issue (everything is readable on a big monitor with
magnification set for detail work - and here's some trivia: Some fonts
at 10-point size are much, much smaller than other fonts at the same
nominal point size; this shouldn't be true but it is), at which point
changing would have required a massive re-organization of many pages.
But there was a much more serious issue to address: Have you noticed
that some PDML members have the temerity to have names that use
non-English characters? The nerve! The font I'd chosen did indeed have
the letters "e" and "a" with accents, but not the letter "c" (Luka
Knezevic-Strika I'm looking at YOU!) The letter "O" with slash, as in
Øksne and Øsleby was also absent. No Copyright symbol either. It did,
however, have all the characters necessary to spell "panic" in
English.
I could have gone for another font, but that would have necessitated a
lot of re-juggling: I'd already spent time on kerning of some sections
and making sure page and line breaks occurred at the right spots. And
I still liked the look of the font. So I ended up buying font editing
software and creating the necessary characters myself. A bit time (and
money) consuming, but very satisfying.
Another lesson learned for next year's book.
--
Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia
www.robertstech.com
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