Wanna look at some page samples?

[mourningdoves]

I recently finished some Vario tags for Greece, printed them out, and...well, they didn't print very well. Everything below the baseline - the descenders (tails) of g, q, etc., the part of commas that makes them commas and not periods, the same for semi-colons - was cut off. I ran the font I was using through a properties analyzer and discovered that it was designed that way. (The typical font has a baseline of 20-25 out of a total height of 125 or so; that is, there are 20-25 units of some measurement whose name I don't know, out of 125 total units, for those descenders. In this infamous font, the baseline was 0.)

That font must be driven out. So I took some boilerplate text from my next Vario-tagging project, copied it 30 or 40 times into table cells, and applied a different typeface to each cell.

If you would like to take a look at it and give your opinions on what looks the best, what is exceptionally readable, what is hard to read, and what is just plain horrible, I've uploaded two files with the fonts embedded. WARNING! The embedding makes the files very large, and if nobody wants to download it, I understand. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice (.odt) file is over 5 MB, and if you're game, it's thisaway. I also converted it into Word 2007-2016 (.docx), and that one is over 10 MB; if you're gonzo-game, it's thataway.

I didn't make a .pdf (which would also be pretty large) because I don't have a way to verify that the fonts would embed properly.

Briefly, the first column of the table is tiny and contains the name and font size (and it's not especially easy to read); the second one has some text about Romanian stamps. Bold and italic attributes are applied in the same (random, meaningless) part of each sample. I'm trying to hit a balance between elegance, readability, compactness, and neat-o italics.

[angore]

If you want to post a PDF, just save it as a jpg image. This will show as you see it.

[Phil]

Dec 21, 2018 16:29:17 GMT -5 mourningdoves said:

......
the part of commas that makes them commas and not periods, 
.......

Sounds like a line out of a Victor Borg skit!


If I understand you, you're just looking for the best font-face to make tags for your Vario Pages??

I suppose that's more a matter of personal opinion. For Tags, to me you'd want something bold. I thought the Book Antiqua or Cambria at a larger size look more distinguishable. 

 

[mourningdoves]

Dec 21, 2018 21:07:26 GMT -5 Phil said:

If I understand you, you're just looking for the best font-face to make tags for your Vario Pages??

I suppose that's more a matter of personal opinion. For Tags, to me you'd want something bold. I thought the Book Antiqua or Cambria at a larger size look more distinguishable.

Hi Phil , yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm conflicted between "something that looks nice", "something that lets me fit more letters into a limited space", and "something that other people will read without making a 'this isn't coffee, is it roasted walnut shells or what? I'm leaving right now!' face".

I love Book Antiqua and it's my default text typeface in LibreOffice for letters and such, but the line spacing is a bit wide and it unfortunately doesn't pass the limited-space test. (Line spacing is built into the font metrics and I don't feel competent to edit it.) Cambria is a contender. Calisto is similar to Cambria and I think I like it even more, but the capital letters are about the size of Russia (check "Carol" and "Danube") and just by themselves can push things onto extra lines.

Thanks for the feedback!!

I wonder if ol' Victor has ever been mentioned on a stamp forum before. I used to really like him when I saw him on television; he was just a cool guy.

[angore]

In LibreOffice, you can modify the line spacing in the Paragraph properties.

You can select fixed spacing. For example, with a 12pt font a spacing of 0.15-in yields almost no spacing between lines and descenders get clipped.

[Phil]

Dec 21, 2018 22:18:34 GMT -5 mourningdoves said:

I wonder if ol' Victor has ever been mentioned on a stamp forum before. I used to really like him when I saw him on television; he was just a cool guy.

There are several videos on You Tube of his acts. I think his shows during the latter part of his career are my favorites.
The way he used classical music as a backdrop to his comedy shows was genius - but you don't need to be a classical music aficionado to find it entertaining.
I especially appreciate the way he didn't need to be crude or vulgar to be funny. A talent that is truly lost today.

[zepherusbane]

I am always challenged when trying to find the right font because from day to day, different ones look right to me.
The elusive search for the perfect font continues!

Out of your sample, I saw two fonts I've used in albums previously and still like. Bookman Antiqua and Cambria. Both of those I'll probably use again depending on what I'm working on. I'm talking about for the text around the placement of stamps, I typically use something else for the Scott numbers.

I saw that you had Medival on the list too, I had not seen that one before and would think that would be perfect for a Germanic country album.

On my most recent album I used a font called Amiri. I don't think I had ever used it before. In this album I used Arial for the Scott numbers though as I think it works better for the numbers.

Here is a sample:

[stampie78]

Dec 22, 2018 10:29:31 GMT -5 Phil said:

Dec 21, 2018 22:18:34 GMT -5 mourningdoves said:

I wonder if ol' Victor has ever been mentioned on a stamp forum before. I used to really like him when I saw him on television; he was just a cool guy.

There are several videos on You Tube of his acts. I think his shows during the latter part of his career are my favorites.
The way he used classical music as a backdrop to his comedy shows was genius - but you don't need to be a classical music aficionado to find it entertaining.
I especially appreciate the way he didn't need to be crude or vulgar to be funny. A talent that is truly lost today.

I used to watch Victor when he was on TV as well. He could take a nothing subject and turn it into a comedic routine and have you laughing hysterically. And your remark about him not having to use crude or vulgar language was dead on. (same goes for Hope and Benny and a few others of that era) Todays comics are just not funny any more. If they did not have body parts to play with or talk about or wives or girlfriends to demean and insult they would not have a routing at all. 99 percent of todays so called comics are just crude, rude and disgusting. May be showing my age a bit here but that's the way I see it.

[mourningdoves]

Dec 22, 2018 6:51:35 GMT -5 angore said:

In LibreOffice, you can modify the line spacing in the Paragraph properties.

You can select fixed spacing. For example, with a 12pt font a spacing of 0.15-in yields almost no spacing between lines and descenders get clipped.

I've never had much luck utilizing that function in LibO; if I could, it would make my decision-making process easier, so I should play around with it again.

Dec 22, 2018 10:56:01 GMT -5 zepherusbane said:

I saw that you had Medival on the list too, I had not seen that one before and would think that would be perfect for a Germanic country album.

On my most recent album I used a font called Amiri. I don't think I had ever used it before.

I do like that Amiri. I just looked it up and the only Amiri I could find was primarily for classical Arabic; the Latin lettering is, I guess, a sideline for them. Or there's another Amari around.

Medieval Sharp is really nice; the bigger the better, though, as I ran it in 11-point and 10-point and the small difference took away much of its unique character - and its readability, at least for me. (I think I'm finally going to get fitted for some prescription reading glasses; the off-the-shelf readers I've been using really aren't cutting it.)

Dec 22, 2018 11:38:29 GMT -5 stampie78 said:

And your remark about him not having to use crude or vulgar language was dead on. (same goes for Hope and Benny and a few others of that era) Todays comics are just not funny any more. If they did not have body parts to play with or talk about or wives or girlfriends to demean and insult they would not have a routing at all.

I pretty much agree overall; every time I'm in a barber shop and they have Comedy Central on, I just want to get out of there. (I have very straight hair and not much of it, so most of the time I can leave pretty quickly anyway.) A couple of years ago I saw George Lopez on television for a few minutes and I bounced off the walls laughing. He was on the White House lawn, with all the Obamas in attendance, so maybe he toned down his regular routine; but at least for a while, he restored my faith in comedy.

[angore]

Dec 22, 2018 14:18:11 GMT -5 mourningdoves said:

Dec 22, 2018 6:51:35 GMT -5 angore said:

In LibreOffice, you can modify the line spacing in the Paragraph properties.

You can select fixed spacing. For example, with a 12pt font a spacing of 0.15-in yields almost no spacing between lines and descenders get clipped.

I've never had much luck utilizing that function in LibO; if I could, it would make my decision-making process easier, so I should play around with it againas

If you use the line spacing function under paragraph you have to select all the text at once so it applies to all lines. 


You can also create a style so you just format the style and it will do the line spacing.

[mourningdoves]

In case anybody's wondering, I ended up using DejaVu Sans Condensed, of all things, for the current batch of pages. I assumed that it was too wide even in the condensed form, but it had a couple of things going for it:

• It has a pretty big X-height and clean lines, so I could work it at 9 points and it was still legible. (For people who are casually reading this thread, "X-height" is the typographical slang for the difference in height between uppercase and lowercase letters. The bigger the X-height, the smaller the difference.)
• Deja Vu is a global open-source project with contributors for all over the place, and it has an astonishing number of Unicode characters. I've been working on pages for Greece, and a few of the characters in the unique Greek take on Cyrillic are hard to find in many otherwise full-featured fonts. For instance, the uppercase Xi is three horizontal lines that look like that "hamburger" which some modern Web sites put in a corner in place of a menu. So with enough Unicode characters, I can transcribe certain overprints as they are on the stamp, not as they are in translation.

If I had to do it all over again, I might have used Deja Vu Serif Condensed. Neither of them look "Greek" or "Balkan" in the slightest, but at this point, anything that looks "legible" cuts it.

Deja Vu is also absolutely free and is available for download all sorts of places. Some font sites are havens for bootlegs and spamware, but I've downloaded a few from Font Squirrel without any unfortunate incidents.

I'll probably have some samples up on the So, What's Stampy? thread tomorrow or the next day, if anybody is interested or really needs to kill some time .

BTW, if you find yourself writing in another alphabet, or a Latin alphabet with accents, I highly recommend WinCompose. It's a series of shortcuts that let you access special characters more easily than fishing through that dropdown box that Word and LibreOffice give you. For instance, [RightAlt], ['], [e] will give you an é, and I just learned that [RightAlt], [*], [J] will give you the uppercase Xi, which looks like Ξ . (The RightAlt, which is set as the universal trigger, can be changed to some other key if you want.) WinCompose is also free. (It's also fairly heavy on resources, so if you have a slower computer it may be annoyingly slow.) The link will take you to GitHub, which can be pretty imposing for non-programmers, but it is a well-regarded and safe site that is widely used for sharing code on open-source projects.

Dec 22, 2018 15:43:21 GMT -5 angore said:

If you use the line spacing function under paragraph you have to select all the text at once so it applies to all lines.

Yeah, I think I'm getting the hang of it now. I thought LibreOffice was asking for the spacing I wanted between lines, but it's asking for the space between the baseline of one line and the top of the next line, which isn't the same thing. So values like 0.14" or 0.16" seem to work well for most of what I need to do around here. Thanks!