What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Georgia and Verdana

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[This is mostly inspired by an article by Daniel Will-Harris from 2005.]

The virtual reality in which most of us swim has some interesting effects.  The process of becoming comfortable with dots on a screen as both text and image sometimes makes us ascribe greater continuity to it than we should.  A few years ago, the depiction of text on screen looked jagged to most of us, but as screens improved enormously, the text seemed --to eyes at first frustrated with pixellation, but later inured to it -- to become actually perfectly smooth.

To many people, the computer screen is just a means to an end.  As Whatsisname says in the article, to them the screen is just a preview of the real thing.  But for many others, the screen is the end of the process; a blog, for instance, seldom or never makes its way into print.

Meanwhile, with computers everywhere, and everyone getting interested in fonts and publishing (including college professors, who could now get their handouts and quizzes looking just the way they wanted, for instance), the number of talented artists working to create new fonts increased dramatically.  On the other hand, and probably quite appropriately, they viewed a font as something that had to look good (literally) on paper in the sense of being physically printed..  But one pioneer: Matthew Carter, took up the challenge (by Microsoft Corporation, as it happens), to create a font face that looked good on a computer screen.

How are computer graphic images designed to look good?

The earliest computer fonts and printers had just a few pixels to work with.  A dot-matrix printer, for instance, could not pretend to be really depicting a font such as, say, Times Roman, that Model T Ford of fonts.  They could only supply the users of 1980 with a (say) 8x10 matrix of dots, and some printers did a better job than others.  If you were a font designer whose job was to create the shapes that the little needles would ink onto your paper, you would obviously  start with a 8x10 matrix, and come up with something like you see here, and that would be "A". (Actually you wouldn't, because your A would have to stop a little higher on the matrix, since A doesn't go below the baseline!  Heavens, that is the ugliest thing I ever created.)

However, getting the great non-technical public computerized was the first challenge of the computer powers of the early 80s.  The Apple folks were the most successful, and probably to this day, it is "Apple folks" who most resent having to confront the fact that the images on their screens are not really as smooth as they have convinced themselves they are.

The new generation of artists, too, bought into this conceit, and designed fonts as if they would be eventually seen at infinite resolution.  A font designer would now create a font using mathematical curves--the same kinds of things you can do in Powerpoint, when you're building a curve.  This sort of curve is called a spline, because the formulas go from one dot to the next, but the angles are sort of "splinted" together to join smoothly.  The fewer the dots, the more elegant, mathematically.  And, with the technology of scalable graphics, the printers could print these at any size you wished.

Coming back to the screen, though, you were back again to roughly 6x8 matrices, but of course now we could use shades of grey.  Recognizing this, Carter and Microsoft decided to make fonts that would look good at 12 point size on the screen.  And Georgia, the very font we use for this blog, is one of the results.  So as long as you use 12 point on your screen, Georgia is going to look fabulous.  I always thought that Georgia sort of snapped into focus at 12 pitch, and now I know why.  Honestly, I would like to own a non-scalable version of Georgia, because it is just so elegant.

[Added later: as I look at Georgia on my browser, I'm amazed to see that Georgia is represented without dithering at lots of different resolutions; 12 point is just one of them.  Now that is a remarkable achievement.  And all of them, at least to some degree, have that stylishness that I associate with Georgia.  Georgia reminds me of a font commonly used in textbooks of about fifty years ago called American Typewriter, and similar related fonts: Bookman, for instance.  Georgia is far more graceful and refined, but it has that cheeky smoothness that American Typewriter had.  I seem to have misplaced American Typewriter somewhere; I loved to use that, especially for quick reports, as well as for URLs, where it was important to be absolutely clear in spelling.]

Verdana was created for the screen with different goals in mind, and you can read all about it in Mr Will-Harris's article from 2005.  One hopes that more designers have, even temporarily, decided to pursue the goal of fonts that will look good at common resolutions.

Here is an image of a block of text at 12 pitch, blown up roughly 400%, and a block of text at 24 pitch on my monitor, blown up 200%.  You can see how at the smaller resolution (for which the font was designed), it settles on the bitmapped design, while at other resolutions it relies on a sort of aliasing (using grey to smooth out the outlines), with limited success.  I think the bitmapped font is amazingly elegant, and Georgia actually looks gorgeous on paper, too, at any resolution.

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