3 ms·
Great to see Bembo being properly appreciated. It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fan
by fidotron 1y ago
Great to see Bembo being properly appreciated.
It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fans.
- lanstin 1y agoI hadn't noticed Bembo before but it was quite good looking.
- dhosek 1y agoI’m a fan of the closely related Poliphilus which is a somewhat more rumpled interpretation of the same sources. Really, the whole Stanley Morison–era catalog of Monotype designs is great stuff. I think the only collection of type designs that rivals it is perhaps the Sumner Stone–era Adobe originals.
- dhosek 1y agoI think a big part of that is that Bodoni-style fonts don’t do so well at low resolutions (and 300 dpi counts as low resolution). It’s somewhat akin to the problem of Optima which loses much of its subtlety when laserprinted even at high resolutions. Bodoni and Didot both call for fine hairlines which lose their grace at screen resolutions and don’t really do that great at laserprinter resolutions either (at 300dpi, with “writes white” laser technology where the whole page is charged and the laser removes the charge from the white parts of the page, the hairlines of CM would often vanish necessitating the “writewhite” hack for the printer modes for those printers).
- delta_p_delta_x 1y agoIndeed. To add some detail—Didone typefaces (th have very high contrast between thick and thin strokes, which at low resolutions seriously affects readability as the thin strokes either disappear altogether, or are badly hinted and anti-aliased.