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

[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.