Re: Origin of Verdana

At 12:09p -0800 02/25/98, Bill Hill wrote:
>For Verdana (and also Georgia, the serif family), Matthew started by
>developing a set of bitmaps at the most important screen sizes. These were
>then used to draw the outlines, which were then hinted so they generated
>those exact bitmaps, but were also scalable.

>Now, when it comes to designing characters for the screen, especially for
>the small sizes typically used for block text, there are a very limited
>number of pixels with which to play

What about the factor of "nominal" screen resolution? A 13" monitor at a
resolution of 640x480 has about 72 pixels per inch -- this is the nominal
"dpi" (ppi?) for MacOS. For some reason, Microsoft puts PCs at 96dpi (why
I don't know -- Pythagorean law should hold true for any platform), with
the result that Arial 9 for Windows has the same number of pixels as
Arial 12 for MacOS. I've seen Arial 9 on many MS/Windows web pages, which
becomes quite illegible (~6.75pt) on the Mac. What is the solution?

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 1998 17:16:19 UTC