A Font of Useless Knowledge, Part 2

Continuing with the discussion of fonts we began yesterday, and a nod to April Fool's Day ...

When comparing the Times New Roman and Garamond fonts, it's clear that Garamond saves money by using less ink. Let's look at the examples again ...

But there would probably still be ink (and, thus, money) to be saved by trimming down the fonts still further - by removing the serifs that are used on some of the individual letters. A serif is a stylistic addition to a letter, as shown in this picture ...

The serifs aren't large, of course, but the amount of ink that would be used to print them in large numbers is not insubstantial. In my opinion, fonts that do not use serifs are less attractive than than fonts with them, but if your goal is simply to save money, dropping the serifs may be a better choice.

Fonts that do not use serifs are referred to as sans serif. And this leads us to the connection between fonts and April Fool's Day.

On April 1, 1977, Britain's Guardian newspaper published a seven-page supplement in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the independence of the semicolon-shaped island nation of San Serriffe, complete with themed advertisements from major companies. The parody was so well-done and convincing that many readers were fooled into thinking that San Serriffe was a real place in the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles, and it's still recognized as one of the most brilliant April Fool's pranks ever hatched. Here's a sample page from the original Guardian story (click it to verbiggen it) ...

And here's a larger picture of the map of San Serriffe that accompanied the story ... note that many of the towns and geographical features are named for various fonts and printing terms (I especially liked "Caissa Superiore," or "Upper Caisse" and "Thirty Point" at the southern end of Caissa Inferiore) ...

And if you still haven't had your fill of jokes about serifs, try this one on for size ...

With apologies to Eric Clapton.

Have a good day. Oh, and APRIL FOOL!!

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo