It is always welcome to see high quality fonts freely contributed to the community. While I think the type1 CM fonts (and relatives) from the American Math Society and from others are quite good, and I'm not really interested in using Times based font set myself, this is never-the-less, a useful contribution.
A distressing number of societies are asking their authors to submit in Times/Times Roman and its ilk, despite the lack of beauty in these fonts.
I am currently assembling a proceedings, and we, at our sponsoring societies request, asked authors to use Times. There are basically two reasons for this:
It is deemed important to have a unified look,
and Times is most easily available to a wide
range of platforms and software.
Most authors are unfortunately creating their
papers in MS Word (and converting to PDF, our
required format), and the default font for a
Word installation is Times. Few authors ever
bother to change this or look at other fonts.
You can criticize them if you wish, but they
are not paid to fuss with fonts, and if they
can say what they need to with minimum fuss
using the defaults, they have no motivation
to consider alternatives.
I must comment also on the matter of embedding fonts. I think all fonts should be embedded in Type 1 or similar outline format. It is the only way to be sure. A number of papers that we have received as PDFs do not display quite right because their authors have different fonts than I do---even slightly different "Times" fonts. And papers from Asia, even when in English, invariably contain glyphs from Asian fonts---apparently even spaces, digits and some symbols like = signs might be pulled out of an Asian font and sneak into a submission with the author none the wiser.
There is no way for authors to know what fonts their readers will have, either today or 10 years or 50 years from now. There is no chance that any set of "standard fonts" will meet all needs, and there is little chance that most authors whose primary job is science will take the time to become familiar with what fonts are "standard" and which are not. They frankly assume that *whatever* they have, everyone will have.
If a PDF paper is to replace a paper paper it should contain as much information as reasonable to describe itself. Embedding outline (not bitmapped) fonts does not result in unreasonably large PDF files, and it ensures that the readers will see what the author intends.
Slashdot Mirror
It is always welcome to see high quality fonts
freely contributed to the community. While I
think the type1 CM fonts (and relatives) from
the American Math Society and from others are
quite good, and I'm not really interested in
using Times based font set myself, this is
never-the-less, a useful contribution.
A distressing number of societies are asking
their authors to submit in Times/Times Roman
and its ilk, despite the lack of beauty in these
fonts.
I am currently assembling a proceedings, and we,
at our sponsoring societies request, asked
authors to use Times. There are basically two
reasons for this:
It is deemed important to have a unified look,
and Times is most easily available to a wide
range of platforms and software.
Most authors are unfortunately creating their
papers in MS Word (and converting to PDF, our
required format), and the default font for a
Word installation is Times. Few authors ever
bother to change this or look at other fonts.
You can criticize them if you wish, but they
are not paid to fuss with fonts, and if they
can say what they need to with minimum fuss
using the defaults, they have no motivation
to consider alternatives.
I must comment also on the matter of embedding
fonts. I think all fonts should be embedded
in Type 1 or similar outline format. It
is the only way to be sure. A number of papers
that we have received as PDFs do not display
quite right because their authors have different
fonts than I do---even slightly different
"Times" fonts. And papers from Asia, even when
in English, invariably contain glyphs from
Asian fonts---apparently even spaces, digits and
some symbols like = signs might be pulled out
of an Asian font and sneak into a submission with
the author none the wiser.
There is no way for authors to know what fonts
their readers will have, either today or 10
years or 50 years from now. There is no chance
that any set of "standard fonts" will meet all
needs, and there is little chance that most
authors whose primary job is science will take
the time to become familiar with what fonts are
"standard" and which are not. They frankly assume that *whatever* they have, everyone will
have.
If a PDF paper is to replace a paper paper
it should contain as much information as
reasonable to describe itself. Embedding
outline (not bitmapped) fonts does not result in
unreasonably large PDF files, and it ensures
that the readers will see what the author
intends.