Jack Campin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think it would be better to adopt one font for the symbols (music > encoded in ABC doesn't need a great number of them) and let users > assign other fonts to specific roles in the score themselves (title > font, composer font, text annotation font...). A user who is trying > to embed scores generated by your software into other documents, or > match an existing "house style" for publication, will need the ability > to control these.
Definitely. > If you must make a choice or set a default... > > My favourite variable-width serif text font is Palatino. I arrived at > that choice by experiment: my vision is not particularly good, has been > deteriorating for years, and this was during a bad patch. I printed a > pageful of the same text at the same size in every font I could find, > seeing which one was readable from the greatest distance. Palatino > won by a big margin, with Computer Modern far at the bottom by an even > bigger one. I rather like Palatino too. The problem with Computer Modern is that to look good it requires printing at a really high resolution (Knuth's books are typeset on a phototypesetter that does something like 4333dpi, and the 600dpi that current laser printers can manage are definitely not enough), so while it is in many ways a very good design the output devices that the likes of us are likely to have around won't really be able to do it proper justice. There is a free Palatino lookalike available with Ghostscript. > I haven't done the same experiment as thoroughly with other kinds of > font, but get the impression Gill Sans would beat any other sans-serif > proportional font at the same test. I generally use Courier for fixed- > width but I'm sure there must be something better out there. Gill Sans is another one that I like. If you go with Palatino a good sans-serif font to use with it is Optima, also by Hermann Zapf (but I don't think a free version is available anywhere). You can get a CD-ROM from Bitstream that has something like 500 fonts at a very reasonable price; the fonts are not great but they are certainly more workable than the usual �1000 FREE FONTS� offerings that you get from jumble sales, and that includes fairly nice versions of Palatino, Gill Sans and Optima. For fixed width, Courier is about as bad a font as there can conceivably be. Knuth's Computer Modern Typewriter is not at all bad (and it even comes in a sane encoding, compared to the rest of CM). Recent distributions of X11 contain a mostly-free set of fonts by B&H called �Lucidux� which includes a rather nice monospaced variety. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau .......................................... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Host: What a parasite lives in or on. Your programs have this relationship to the computer. -- Larry Wall & Randal Schwartz, *Programming Perl* To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
