04 Apr
2007
(Apparently the Helvetica view was not available)
≡ 12:42 pm ≡ oops photo print rice type
Tag: type
I just updated my copy of Adobe Reader so I’d be able to add fancy annotations to PDFs (one of the side-effects of your advisor being halfway across the country is that it’s harder to pass marked-up drafts back and forth).
I officially hate it in all ways. RAM eater? Check. (The reader takes up gobs of memory as you’d expect, and even the Safari plugin chews up an additional 40MB when it first loads.) Interface? Uglier than the dog poop left in my parking spot by the neighbors in the next building.
But what’s really driving me nuts is the text rendering. This is Adobe, for pete’s sake—you’d think they’d have gotten it down! But, no, the anti-aliased type display is a disaster. The ClearType (or CoolType, or MyType, or ZOMGtyp3!, or whatever Adobe calls it) is worse—a plague visited upon the Earth. There’s also some kind of horrible spasm going on inside the hinting engine, visible especially at small point sizes:
(a)
(b)
Fig. 1. A block of graphics and type in Adobe Reader (a) and Apple Preview (b). The Preview rendering occasionally drops half-pixels along straight lines, in slavish service to the underlying shapes; Reader, on the other hand, is so obsessed with screen pixel boundaries that lines seem to jump all over the place (note especially letters like “i” and “t” that have both ascenders and x-height features).
So I’m thinking I’ll shelve Reader until I absolutely positively need to do some annotation that can’t be handled by Preview. But does anyone know of an easy, reversible way to switch on and off Reader’s control of PDF viewing in Safari? (Online documentation seems to indicate that Reader will “heal” Safari if it notices that the PDF viewer plugin has been deleted.)
Update 2/1: Well, at least Adobe lets you turn off the Web plugin (in the Reader app’s preferences):
Or, “Reason #173 why How I Met Your Mother makes me laugh harder than any other show currently on TV.” Stills from the last scene in tonight’s ep, “Swarley,” as soon as I can find ‘em.
The following (somewhat incoherent) blog entry is best justified using the following formula:
B = a × p(t) × E-1 + h
a = Attempt to clear out excess beer from previous parties
p = probability that beer has gone bad since time t
t = time of previous parties
E = rationalizing force usually in effect around the house
E-1 = lack of said force
h = HBO film schedule for summer
B = sappy blog entry
This entry is thusly subtitled:
“Star Trek: The Motion Picture” — One Of The Greatest Movies Ever Made, Or The Very Greatest?
OK, NYT, you have both Times and Georgia on your redesigned pages (not to mention some pre-rendered headlines set in Times). So you need to choose a serif typeface. One. Right now.
Monaco 9 has started acting really strange! The bitmapped capital “G” glyph has changed, becoming more compressed: 
I just noticed it in Mail.app this morning, so it can’t have been like this for very long (can it?). Anyway, this is not what Monaco is supposed to look like…
Update: Is it something with Mail.app, then? Using M9 in iTerm, I can see the correct glyph: 
… and here’s TextEdit: 
Bizarre.
Update 2: Oh noes, it’s spread to the “K” now!
Update 3 (Jan. 27): Fixed (see the comments).
From Poynter Online - Eight Things You Can Do Now To Improve On-Screen Readability:
3. Define type size by pixel, not by point size. Each monitor resolution will be different, so the type that you specify as “10 point” might measure as 14 points on one system and something different on another.
Uh, what? That’s insane. Here’s some sanity.
