David Frenchism

To be honest, I’m not running the absolutely latest version of Adobe’s software (for Illustrator). And, as I noted, there are some setting you can set. And that may include optical spacing proportional to the size of the type.

Even so, you first have to know those settings are there. And you then have to care about the issue. A friend of mine (a fellow printer) took a college course not long ago in printing and graphic design. He was astounded by the level of ignorance regarding the basics….and from the teachers, not the students (who, of course, are not going to be born with any of this information inside their heads)

I would imagine this same lament applies to every one of the other arts out there. Do you suppose modern artists are taking the same care with perspective and such as the old-school ones did?

Remember that engineering failure a couple years ago? It was the result of some student project. Do you think Boeing’s jets are falling out of the sky because the law of physics have changed or because you have a lot of hacks doing programming?

Granted, overwhelmingly the technology in our culture does work well…if only because there are immediate consequences (monetary and/or safety) if they don’t.

But for the arts? Forgetaboutit. Strangely, the most sophisticated art on the planet right now is computer-generated imagery (CGI). Interestingly, tens of millions are put into getting these things to be increasingly realistic and/or fancy. But it would appear that they don’t spend more than about $229.00 for the movie scripts. That’s bizarre, but fundamentally and analogously true.

This looks like some kind of olive enema tool:

Technically speaking, I think it’s just that.

Have you ever messed with the margins, line space, typeface size, and such, in a book reader? It’s there that you can get an immediate understanding of the need for a bit of space for optimal legibility.

And not just between the letters. Because screen sizes are limited on the Kindle and I want to reduce the amount of page turning as much as possible, I’ve fiddled with some of the spaces options (as well as the spacing options in book reading apps on my iPad).

If you try to take too much space tween the lines (line spacing or leading‚ the distance between adjacent line of type) you’ll find the text is a little harder to read.

The examples here is self-explanatory. Obviously you can scrunch things too tightly. But, technically speaking, the works are still there, not obscured in the least. (A more actual size version here.) But it’s just harder to read.



Serif type is usually easier to read than san-serif type. The first example was Helvetica (san-serif). Here’s a sample using the serif typeface, Georgia. It’s set 10/16 (10 pts. in size wit 16 points of leading, pronounced “ledding”). The Helvetica sample was 10/14.

Georgia, particularly for computer screens, is one of the most legible typefaces in existence and is usually what I use. But there are some other good ones as well.

No, it’s excellent, although for my eyes it could be a little bigger. And remember we’re talking about seeing this text on a low resolution computer monitor.

My Kindle Paperwhite is set to the typeface, “Bookerly.” You can load your own typefaces on the unit as well. I did that once but it soon disappeared so I stayed with Bookerly which works well.

Mr. Kung, which typeface do you prefer on your Kindle?

I wish I still had the old Underwood typewriter that was my first hand-me-down of the kind. I can’t be sure what model it was because I don’t have it. But it looked something like this:



But then they all tended to look something like this, at least the old ones.

Another prominent brand was the Royal:



Typing on the old Underwood was not easy. How odd that Apple’s latest keyboards (at least for me) have gone ergonomically backward as the can-do-no-wrong libtards, disconnect from reality regarding practical designs, run amok.

It’s not that the current “chicklet-like” Apple keyboards are hard to press. It’s that they have no feedback to them. With the old Underwood, of course, the feedback for every keystroke was voluminous.

And then there is the hell of correction tape. A necessity, but not easy to use and not always effective.

I have no idea what happened to the old Underwood. It probably got sold in a garage sale or something like that.

I’d have to rack my brain to figure out the order of computers I had or had access to.

I had a VIC-20 computer at one point. I didn’t get all that much out of it. It’s primary use was to run the Omega Race cartridge that I had for it. But I wanted to dip my toe in the water and see what computers were all about.

I think it was after the VIC-20 that I got an Atari 800 which was certainly more capable, especially after I added a hard drive and printer. That eventually broke and I then got an Atari 800 XL. We all had an Atari 2600, of course, but that wasn’t considered a computer.

After the Ataris, I think there was a gap in years until I finally bought my first Macintosh, a Macintosh SE. It was expensive but necessary. Since then it’s been a trail of upgraded Macs unto this very day.

My father had an old PC of some kind in his office at one point. That was before I had a Mac so it seemed fairly advanced to me. It was an old Sanyo computer. It was probably running window 3.1 or something like that. A beast to use and far from user friendly.

Interestingly, I made use of my Atari 800 XL for keeping an index of street names for the production of a map. I’ve done my share of talking online about computers. And if you complain about some obviously ass-backward bit of software or hardware, you will be call an “old beard” who is just afraid of change. Basically these same brain-dead minions are the ones who so easily fell for Barack Obama, all slaves to newness whether it was actually better or not. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.”

These same idiots believe anything Butt-gig or any of the other Communists promise. But what I’m trying to say, is that I had no problem using whatever technology at hand to get the job done and trying something new.

So I bought and used an old database program called SynFile+ for the Atari 800XL. It allowed me to keep a database of road names that then could be printed out for use in the production of commercial folded street map.



I had no printer hooked to the Atari that was good enough for final output. I had some old dot matrix thingie. What I did was rather strange, perhaps even innovative for what I had. I bought a modem for my Atari and transferred by modem the exported and formatted text from SynFile+ into a Windows computer at the office also equipped with a modem.

To make this work, I would have to run home, get connected, get coordinated with a fellow back at the office, and then with a bit of effort get the text file to send. It was an entire unapologetic Rube Goldberg setup. But it allowed me to print out the text on agood printer at the office and use that printout as finished artwork.

This was all on me because my father really had no designs at that stage to make use of the computer. If I wanted to done, I had to do it. And as it turned out, if I wanted to move the graphics to a computer, I had to buy it myself, which I did. But it wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise and the conversion from presstype and X-Acto to computers would never have been done. It probably took me ten years to pay down my MasterCard balance.

I was learning how to do graphics on the Macintosh almost from day one. My first version of Adobe Illustrator was “Illustrator 88” which is basically 1-point-something software. The number stands for the year it was put out. They didn’t stay with that naming convention.

Now, of course, the industry has moved on. Most content now is probably involved in video production of some kind. But I have no interest in that. Not old-beard but old-school when it comes to the primacy of books and photographs. As much as I love a good movie (and there is certainly a lot of money in various forms of video production work), that is the realm of glib and superficial.

Still, it’s interesting that there has arisen some kind of market or challenge for movies shot entirely on phones. I can dig that. I think that’s a splendid use of technology. Frankly, given the low cost of phones (let alone good digital video cameras), and the relative easy of using digital effects and editing software, we could see an end-run made around the big studios. Sure, they are still probably important in regards to distribution. But I think it won’t be all that long before the next Oscar for best picture goes to a phone-camera movie (or something not far from that) produced on a dime but by people with an enormous talent for story telling.

It is this lack of talent in the current industry that produces so much garbage.