Farsong Blog-o-Matic

A .pdf does seem strange, but should be fine.
Liz

On 5/19/08, Steve Johnson wrote:
Professor,

Attached is the properly-formatted version of my annotated bibliography, with coversheet.

Again, thank you for being accommodating with this assignment. Please let me know if you have any issues with the PDF file.

--
Steve

She let me know she had issues with it. I’m guessing most students send Microsoft Office Word files.

I had this conversation with @nicolerae yesterday: I put things in PDF because they’re easier to open.

Back in the day (up until Office 2000/Office X, really), it was a point of fact that even files between different versions would always be formatted wrong, and sometimes would not even work.

It was even worse switching files between Macs and PCs. Classic (OS 7.6+) didn’t play well with PC-format diskettes, and the translation between a Word document and a Clarusworks Document most formatting went “poof.” And good luck if you had any font formatting.

Enter the PDF. Portable Document Format. It preserves not only formatting, but the fonts as well. Plus, the files are super-tiny, and super-fast (as long as you don’t use the Adobe Acrobat Reader — it’s bloated and slow, even on a fast multi-core system).

I was super-pleased when I switched to OSX because it offered the option of printing and saving directly to a PDF file from anywhere in the system — Safari, Word, Finder, Photoshop. Anything that hooked into the modified CUPS system implemented in OSX.

I can send a PDF to anyone, and they can open it and see it and print it, regardless of the OS they’re using. On OSX, Linux, or even Windows, my documents display properly in the right font with the right formatting. Plus, the files are light and easy to email.

I should probably note the font as well. I’ve been bouncing around between different serifed fonts, lately — between Hoefler Text and Adobe’s Pro setting of the classic Caslon — both of which are great classic serifed text fonts (ie, body text), and neither of which are available on most machines, and certainally not public computers. Now, most won’t notice the differences between Hoefler Text and Adobe Caslon Pro, let alone their difference from the default Times New Roman. It’s not a bad font, but I like the original Times better — Times New Roman being too tall and thin for my tastes. I don’t think I’ve ever liked it — and yet, everyone uses it without thinking.

I generally save the usage of sans-serifed fonts for my design and titles, using the serifed fonts for body text. I just don’t think sans-serifed text looks as good in print, though that’s more opinion than anything, and there are certainly instances where sans would be preferred to serifed. I think that serifed letters read better, though; Schliebe can attest to that, and how I agonisingly hand-serifed the letters on the signs we made for the concert. It looked good.

As serifed fonts go, though, I do love Helvetica and its whole family. Yes, the font is utterly ubiquitous in today’s world, but it’s a clean, crisp font. It reads well, and it prints well (though, it’s not a good screen font, and its leakage into interfaces needs to be stemmed — we have well-made screen fonts for that already, including Lucidia Grande and Arial, both Helvitica look-alikes that look good on the last 15 years’ displays).


Edit: I forgot the entire reason why I started rambling about this: I sent the professor a PDF because I formatted the paper in InDesign, because Word was bothering me. Since it’s in InDesign, I can't exactly send the professor a simple text file.

And it reminds me: the current state of files these days is like that 15 years ago: just after we thought that Word Document files would work everywhere, Office goes and makes a new version with their “open document format” that only MS Office reads, and only the newest version. It makes life hard again, because unless you have the latest version of the software to read and write, the files are extremely hard to parse for their content.

And now Windows users with old versions of Office know what it was like to be a Mac user a decade ago.

Thoughs about Barack Obama's use of the font Gotham for signage.

I think it’s interesting that the design of Gotham was influenced by early Modernism, another movement that was about change and social idealism. And I like that the design aesthetic that may help move Obama into the White House was inspired by the humble NY Port Authority Bus Terminal sign.

Fonts are cool and idealistic! Hooray!

via daringfireball

The keyboard font used on all iBook models and 2003 and later PowerBooks is VAG Rounded, a variation on Helvetica Rounded.

Apple's other keyboards use Univers Italic on the keycaps.

So, I was wondering this thing. The truth, apparently, really was out there. My desktop's keyboard has Univers Italic, and the MacBook has the slick-looking rendition of a Helvetica-like font. Cool!


As for writing things, I used to like “Eurostyle” 'till I got wise to serif-ing. And it seemed that everyone was using it for ads. Now It's Hoefler Text I'm fond of. That, or Bell MT (which feels like a slightly lighter font because it is lighter and less condensed, but looks nearly the same). As long as it's not Times New Roman.

And I like the picture the icon is made from because the letter A has a pointed top. Seems like a rare thing in typography these days. I think it looks cool, but that's just me.

Anyway, I'm certain that there are some people out there who have a favorite font for doing things with.