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Blue Pencil no. 18–Some history about Arial
- DiabloD3 1y agoFor a great article about typefaces, the size of text on that website sure is small.
- WillAdams 1y ago>As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country. The money Microsoft paid mostly went to the _man-years_ of development effort towards hinting, so if Helvetica had been chosen, that would have been even more expensive. There were several reasons not to choose the Linotype design Helvetica: - Linotype had recently sued Microsoft for trademark infringement over the "Tms Rmn" and "Helv" pixel fonts, and that loss still stung - Helvetica was being used by, and quite strongly associated with Microsoft's direct competitors Apple (it was a core font on the Apple Laserwriter, and even folks w/o access to those outlines would often use the quite nice pixel fonts of the various sizes of Helvetica and even more so with NeXT, since it was used as the UI font on NeXTstep (so as to better showcase their large/high resolution (for the time) screens _and_ it was part of their brand identity. EDIT: For an example of a company cheaping out on licensing Helvetica (and Times Roman), look to Adobe, Adobe Acrobat 4 which swapped in Times New Roman PS and a matching Arial in lieu of Linotype's Times Roman and Helvetica.
- sombragris 1y agoVery interesting tidbits on the history of Arial. My line of work often makes me share editable word processor documents with clients. I love Helvetica, but I have a strong dislike of Arial. In fact if I could choose I would use something similar to Frutiger or Myriad as a sans-serif. But when I have to prepare such documents with a sans-serif font, I always use Arial, because it looks decent enough, and everyone is almost guaranteed to have it. Nothing shiny, but a good workhorse.
- Bluestein 1y ago> would use something similar to Frutiger or Myriad Noted. Will try them :)
- sombragris 1y agowe're deep in off-topic territory, but maybe you'll find useful the LaTeX Font Catalogue. It's for LaTeX, but you can get and install all those fonts system-wide. Here's the link for the sans-serif fonts: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/sansseriffonts.html https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/sansseriffonts.html
- Bluestein 1y agoReally appreciate it. Will definitely check it out.-
- spookie 1y agoMay I suggest Linux Biolinum in the "if I could use" category. Very elegant and readable.
- sombragris 1y agoWhile Biolinum is certainly free to use, install, and download, not everyone has it on their computers. Besides that, and from a subjective standpoint, I don't like it very much. (Libertine is great as a serif font, though). Even though I don't like it, Arial at least is almost guaranteed to exist on a destination device. An added plus is that is very well hinted, thus making it very readable at almost every font size on screens.
- Jealous8 1y ago[dead]
- Bluestein 1y agoSide thought: At what point (if ever) will AI generation be used to algorithmically generate fonts on the fly, for your particular preferences, or, even - in order to present content in the way most absolutely likely to influence you?
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 1y agoI spent several years with DCF, Document Composition Facility, and markup languages - including one of my own. At Xerox I worked on software to enable DCF output on Xerox printers. Much preferred Optima to the sans serif fonts. Printer and screen resolution have a large effect on the appearance of fonts. Low resolution favors sans serif, but Garamond was pretty good on earlier IBM laser printers.