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DESIGN.C21
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1992-02-24
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** E-Mail Desktop Publishing Design Course **
***** SPECIAL LESSON 1A *****
By special permission from the author and magazine, this is a reprint
of an article from E C & I (Electronic Composition and Imaging)
magazine's @Nov/Dec 91 issue. The author is @Mr. David @Vereschagin.
*********************************************************************
The Dilemma of 300 DPI
It's a sobering moment the first time you hear someone refer to your
300 dpi laser printer as a low resolution output device. Just when you
think you've made the jump into the big time, leaving behind the crude
and rudimentary output of your old dot matrix printer, you discover
that your big (and relatively expensive) leap is considered by many to
be put a tiny skip. Worse yet, all those beautiful typefaces that you
have been eyeing and saving for are, you now find, are considered too
delicate, subtle, or refined to be trusted to the cruelties of 300 dpi
resolution. Aside from crying in your beer, what can you do?
Don't ruin your beer by getting it all salty. It may never be able to
compete with the sharpness and detail of a 1,000 dpi or better
imagesetter but there are many options available to get the best
possible quality from your 300 dpi laser printer.
While not every font available from digital type foundries is going to
be suitable for use at 300 dpi, there is still a wide range of faces
that will print, if not outstandingly, then certainly within
acceptable limits on an ordinary laser printer. When choosing
typefaces the following guidelines should help you get the most out of
your printer.
GO STRAIGHT
Your laser printer is, despite its fancier technology, still just a
souped-up dot matrix printer. Don't be offended; even imagesetters
with resolutions of 2,400 dpi or more are essentially the same. All
these printers create text and graphics by placing dots in a
rectilinear grid. The only essential difference between your old dot
matrix and your new laser printer is the fineness of the grid. Your
new grid is 300 squares high by 300 squares wide. But it's still a
rigid grid. The grid squares will not move slightly to the sides or up
or down to help your printer draw curves. Your printer has only two
choices: to put a black dot in a specific square of the invisible
grid, or not. This means that your printer excels at drawing straight
lines. The kind of straight lines it does best are those that are
strictly vertical, strictly horizontal, or at a 45 degree angle. You
can use that fact to help you select appropriate typefaces. There are
a few typefaces that are made up of nothing but straight lines, but
these are not highly readable when used for setting body text. They
may work as interesting display or headline faces, though. What you
want aren't faces that are totally composed of perpendicular lines,
but ones that have a square and a straight character. Watch out for
curves, they are often subtle and may cause problems not only at text
size but also when you use a face at larger sizes. Observe the lines -
when the outline of a character takes a turn, is it a tight one? Don't
forget to check every character in the face. An uppercase M may often
have its sides sloped slightly, which could result in ragged printing.
Examples of serif text typefaces that maintain a square, upright
character are Egyptienne, Melior, Utopia, and Zapf Book. In sans serif
faces, News Gothic and Eurostile fit the description.
OPEN UP IN THERE
The empty holes in letters, as found in the lowercase a, e ,and g are
called "counters". And they do count. You want to keep them open and
visible to help your readers recognize characters and the words they
form, and also to avoid unsightly black splotches in your text.
Look at the typefaces you are considering to ensure that the counters
are open and generous. Avoid faces like ITC Galliard and Adobe
Garamond, in which the counter of the e or the a is small. They may
look pretty in the type sample books, but they may also end up pretty
ugly if you try using them on your printer. Watch to see what happens
to a typeface as its weight gets heavier. You want the counters to
remain as open as possible in the bolder weights also. Text faces that
are open where it counts include ITC Century and Cheltenham, Linotype
Centennial, Stone Informal and Stone Serif, and Candida. Sans serif
faces such as Akzidenz Grotesk, Trade Gothic, and Univers will stay
open for you.
X-HEIGHT-MENT
The x-height of a typeface is exactly that - the heighth of the
lowercase x. Many people consider faces with large x-heights in
relation to the cap height to be clumsy. But that needn't be the case.
Faces with a large x-height are a help to those with 300 dpi printers
simply because they give the lowercase letters more room to breath.
While I would hesitate to say the bigger the better, try to find faces
that have an ample x-height, but in which the lowercase letters don't
start competing with the uppercase. Otherwise you may be inviting a
readability nightmare.
Some appropriate text faces include ITC Century, Lucida, Raleigh,
Utopia, and Nimrod. Sans serif faces that can be considered are Lucida
Sans, Trade Gothic, and Univers.
Continued in next message.............