help me do my job

[mountain_laurel]

i'm designing a Frame template for a document that will be distributed in PDF format. at all my previous jobs, the default body text font was 10 point Times New Roman. it's a familiar font that's very readable in print, but i'm not quite convinced it's the best choice for a PDF document, so i've got a few questions about how people use PDF documentation and what their font preferences are. feel free to comment on anything you think i haven't covered, since i know some of you are extremely particular about this sort of thing.

me personally, i think 12 point is easist to read online, but is too big in print. maybe 11 point is the answer? maybe i'm being excessively fussy? maybe people prefer the familiar and i should shut up and stick with Times10pt? let me know what you think.

IMPORTANT: the URL i give for the sample document is wrong, and i can't go back and edit it now -- the correct url is http://www.writingtable.net/samples/Untitled.pdf. sorry about that!

[Poll #954218]

Comments

[crisper.livejournal.com]

That test-document link took me to some default top-of-tree page, not to a PDF document of fonts.

[merde.livejournal.com]

yeah, i posted the wrong link and you can't go back and edit a poll. the correct document is here:

http://www.writingtable.net/samples/Untitled.pdf

[nothings.livejournal.com]

There's something screwy with the fonts in that PDF; they look way worse than PDF fonts normally do for me (there's inconsistent weights like they're not being hinted right, and the baseline of the TNR 12pt seems inconsistent between letterforms). Mind you, they're not awful (the way a lot of postscript->PDF conversions are), they're just slightly wonky. Normally TNR in a PDF is fine for me.

I tend to pref zoom-to-fit-width if text is single-column and zoom-to-fit-page if it is multi-column, for obvious UI navigation reasons. I'll zoom until the font is readable if necessary, but if that introduces horizontal scrolling it's a PITA.

[merde.livejournal.com]

take a look at it now and see if it's any better. i changed a couple of the advanced postscript settings.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it looks like it might be a little different, but I might be fooling myself. There's definitely still weighting problems; for example, both tips of the lowercase-s in TNR disappear to almost nothing, and the bottom of the e is too heavy. I dunno, maybe this is just a different version of TNR than I'm used to, but it seems clearly wrong, rather than just a difference of taste.

Here's a screenshot/demo (http://nothings.org/misc/merde_pdf.png), in case maybe this is just somehow something with my machine. (This isn't quite what's on my screen, because I have ClearType on, so I forced the screenshots to grey.)

Note that I have windows font scaling on, which means the fonts come out larger in most apps (like WordPad) but not in PDFs, where they have to stay the same size to fit the page layout. But even though the sizes don't match at all, you can see the differences I'm talking about.

Hope this is helpful somehow; I'm not sure it's something you can fix.

[merde.livejournal.com]

ah, but you're comparing a font rendered through a print driver to a screen font. what you're seeing there is Acrobat's anti-aliasing. compare it to other pdf documents on the web (there are several high-quality ones on my samples page at http://www.writingtable.net/index3.html) and you'll see the text quality is pretty similar. and all these documents -- including the typeface sample for this post -- were printed from Frame as archive-quality postscript and then pdf'd. (interestingly, printing directly to pdf from Frame gets much worse results than from Word.)

i'd be interested if you can find a higher-quality example in pdf format -- this is something i've always found annoying.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know pdf renders a bit different, but I can't author PDF, so I have no way of being sure a font is TNR, much less its size, but let me poke around for a bit.

Oh, hey, nevermind, this old Intel document shows exactly the same artifacts at 100%. Whoops. Well, now I know why I hate reading PDFs so often.

[merde.livejournal.com]

yeah. it's really irritating how differently things render in different software. Frame is a particular offender in that area.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Let's be more difficult. I'll read a short document online. I'll probably print out a large one.
My have-to-be-difficult print-vs-screen balance is that yes, I want it readable at 2-up sizing, but I don't want to have to 2x the number of pages due to the layout.

On screen, I try to size to whatever /scrolls/ the easiest…

In printed fonts I want serifs, good descenders, and reasonable kerning (except if it's a monospace. In screen fonts… I don't know.

That help at all? (Oh, and your example URL's 404ing…)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oddly, i preferred Palatino 12 at "Fit Page" but Century Schoolbook 12 at 100%. I was surprised at how nice the TNR 12 looked; i hate it in Word.

With my widescreen laptop, i like maximizing my Acrobat Reader window, and then fitting two pages in the window. I wish i could do that in M$ Word.

I like having the doc online for grepping, but printed if i have to read the whole thing.

[merde.livejournal.com]

in Word, select View -> Print Layout. then go to the Zoom option on your toolbar and select "two pages".

then buy me a beer because i'm SO FUCKING COOL.

[kodi]

I wish i could do that in M$ Word.

Am I just being thick? Word seems perfectly willing to do that for me.

[merde.livejournal.com]

incidentally, you suggested lucida sans, but most people find sans fonts less readable for body text, and while i love it for headings, at smaller sizes it renders poorly in Acrobat.

i'm really fond of Palatino myself -- i use it as the screen font when i write fiction because i find it both readable and attractive. (i'm also fond of Centaur for that, but it'd be a bit twee for documentation.)

[kodi]

TNR 12pt looked best to me, but Georgia 12pt was most readable at 100%. At fit-to-page, the only 10pt font that was readable was Georgia. I'm happiest if I can fit the whole page on, because then I can browse through the document with a single key.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

In my Web browser, all those fonts look bad except TNR and Georgia - which also happen to be the two that aren't embedded, so it's quite possible that I'm seeing my carefully handcrufted default fonts instead of whatever you intended to put in.

In xpdf, which handles anti-aliasing better, they all look pretty good; I think TNR and Garamond seem most readable.

[rizbone.livejournal.com]

And by difficult I mean I read manuals on my commute.