Quote:
Originally Posted by AceHarddrive
Hello all!
What do you consider the "best" fonts and font sizes for reading on handheld devices, such as my Tapwave Zodiac 2?
Thanks all!
~Tim ^_^
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On my Zodiac 2, I use the old freeware version of FonthackV, with the Zodiac compatible 2.39 beta of Igor Nesterov's YAHM for OS5 as the hack manager. For the default font for all applications on the Zodiac, I use 22pt HandEra Thin and Thick (provided with Fonthack) for standard and bold face, and the built in system fonts for Large, Large Bold, and symbol.
My usual ebook reader is Plucker, which supports custom fonts under OS5. For that, I use Bitstream+FreeMono 14pt, with a single space leading. For the Library list, I use the same font in a smaller 12pt version. Since I have an assortment of technical documentation that includes codes snippets as well as fiction and other works, a font that includes a mono-spaced face for the code fragments works well. (The versions I have were converted by Plucker Dev David Desrosiers, but I don't have a link for them at hand.)
I've been a designer/production guy for print stuff, and I'm a contrarian. The usual assumption is that serif fonts are inherently more readable. I disagree. I think a sans-serif can work fine for body copy, assuming you choose a good font to begin with, and pay attention to leading, kerning, and measure. (Setting body copy is an art a lot of folks who make their living as designers don't seem to have mastered.)
On the Zodiac, at least, sans-serif faces work better for me than serif fonts.
One of the things I've been playing with in the background is font conversion for the PDA. I have iSilo-X desktop installed here. iSilo-X desktop can take True Type fonts and convert them to a format usable by the iSilo viewer on the PDA. As it happens, I don't use iSilo. But Alex Pruss released a freeware utility called Font Collector that resides on the PDA, and can convert the isilo fonts to other formats, including FonthackV, Fonts4OS5, and his own Font Smoother. Unless you run something like MSMount (which makes files in a directory on a card appear to be in RAM), fonts normally have to live in RAM on a PalmOS device, so there's a limit to how many you may wish to have handy, but there's lots of room for experimentation. (MSMount, alas, does not run on the Zodiac.)
FonthackV is here:
http://trials.palmgear.com/dl2.php/5...HackV_1.03.zip
YAHM for OS5 is here:
http://yahm.palmoid com
Font Collector is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmfontconv/
______
Dennis