Quote:
Originally Posted by Barnes
SMost of these fonts are old, as in Roman times old. There's a reason why they are still around.
|
That's totally wrong. Most of the fonts you mentioned were developped after the renaisance - and there really weren't such things as 'fonts' in Roman times. The font is a direct result of the invention of the movable type press by Gutenberg in 1440 - prior to that there were only a couple of types of fonts - those made by chisels on stone and those made by brushes on paper basically.
The serif's history is two-fold, partially it is a remnant of the marks left by a chisel on stone, but it also draws its heritage from ink-on-paper writing as serifs make a font look like one character flows into the next.
The easiest way to tell if a font is pre or post-renasannce is to look at the lower-case letter 'e'. If the horizontal bar on the character slopes up to the right slightly it is a renaisannce font, if it is perfectly horizontal it is from the post-renaisannce.
Here are some great font related sites:
www.identifont.com - this site has examples of hundreds, if not thousands of fonts. Also, if you're curious about what font a piece of writing is in this site will help you identify it by asking a series of questions.
http://www.typophile.com/ - a site dedicated to fonts and the people who love them - message boards, news updates, graphic arts resources etc.
Also - try to avoid setting large blocks of text in sans-serif, it's harder to read, use sans-serif for headings like titles or chapter names.
Use a serifed font for blocks of text - if you're stuck with MS Word, I totally recommend Garamond - it will actually shorten the length of your paper slightly - but it's the best looking font the software has.
If you
really want to get a decent font get yourself a copy of Adobe InDesign - the industry standard page layout program - it comes loaded with hundreds of professional fonts.