Times Roman

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Thank you so much for registering just to reply to this thread. I feel flattered. Is it true that the Times adopted Times Roman due to the fact that someone called the paper "Typographically Backwards," hence the entire happening involving the research to pick Times? Why are teachers in schools so obsessed with it...or is that just because its available for free, hence most computers would have? (I've actually gotten in trouble for handing in assignments that were not in times, but instead in a form of Courier due to the fact that I used to write with an electric typewriter instead of a computer. Forms of Courier are standard on old IBM electrics.)

By the way, I had one other question if I am not angering people too much. I sometimes write things in Japanese. With a computer, I can set Kanji and Kana text to analogs of the Roman fonts. Is it best to use monospaced fonts, considering Japanese is meant to be organized into columns when read anyways? Thanks!

There are very few fonts which are guaranteed to be on almost every computer today regardless of the operating system.

Arial/Helventica and Times are two, courier is the third.

It makes sense to restrict documents which will be edited on multiple machines to these three whenever possible.

Arial/Helventica is best for Screen Reading

Times is the best of the three for Print Reading

Courier is the best for computer code.

If the teachers intend to print things out to read, then it's certain that they'll go for Times.

Isn't MS Sans Serif closer to Helvetica than Arial is?

The Venetian typefaces have some specialities: The horizontal stork of the "e" is placed quite high and not horizontal, the dots ".", ":" and ";" are not round but card-diamonds, the serifs are not fully straight but follow a curve, "o" and other letters have a stress against the writing direction and a very low x-hight. The combination of this almost irregular feature will make a Venetian typeset very "lively", elegant and easy to read, because the different letter are not too uniform.

Century Schoolbook is much striker and regular in it's forms and gives therefore an other appearance.

I don't like Times roman at all (visually that is, it displeases my eyes)
and will change any text to Arial if I can.


Some time ago I had all my text on the menus and icons changed into 'Matisse'
http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=204052
In the beginning it was not so very easy to read it, just by letting my eyes pass over it, like one usually does,
but after a while I got so used to it and this difficulty disappeared.
So I guess it's also a matter of habit?

Yes - If you take the example of the German black letters or "Fraktur". If start to read those, it is quite slow. The differences between letters are often minimal ("long s" and "f"). Here an example "sfs" vs. "fsf":



But if you read frequently German texts printed prior ca. 1940 you increase slowly your reading speed and finally read those letter as fast as any antiqua.

It just takes the brain a while to get trained on this minimal differences

I had to look up Century Schoolbook to be reminded what it looks like, but now that I have, I know I've seen a lot of things published in it. Doesn't the Supreme Court of the USA use Century Schoolbook?

I very much like the card diamond periods, colons, semicolons, etc. Speaking of that, I have seen typefaces where the question mark appears to be an S with a dot underneath it. Which sorts of typefaces are these?

My school essays are always required to be in Times New Roman, regardless if I am printing them, or emailing them. I found this kind of counterproductive, considering that sans-serifeds are easier to read on a computer.

I look, but I do not see...

Probably spend too much time looking at printouts to see if they're only 'legible'
(I fix printers for a living...

I do not mean to bump my own thread or anything, but I found a great site to share with you guys. 1001 Free Fonts is a great place to download fonts it looks like. A lot of them seem like knock offs, and I don't think they're available for commercial use or anything, but some of them are actually quite useful I think.

I used to go there quiet a bit ... (even though Corel Draw ships with 750 font out of the box) - of which I limit myself to about 400 otherwise the computer slows down too much.

Hehehe

Aren't Corel Draw fonts in some format that needs to be converted to be usable?

So my 40 or so fonts aren't that bad?

I'm using Corel Draw 7 (I could have gotten a new one but I've not found anything I can't do with v7) - and it's fast because it's designed for old computers.

The fonts that came with it are all TrueType. They work on Windows and, I believe on Mac. I don't know about linux ? Does anyone know? Orwell? Lau?

Yes, True Type is the default for linux.

Ah, hehe, I have an old obsolete version.

Each letter in Times Roman is the most basic that letter can be, and therefore the easiest to read. My favourite font is chiller.

That's true - there's not much that's more basic as a serifed font.