The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Apache

Over the years I came to realize that my taste in reading materials, as my taste in sports, does not correlate with the majority of people.

My taste doesn't correlate with the majority of people, but it does correlate with some people. So when I find a reviewer who loves some of the same books as I do, I'll look at their other recommendations.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Times New Roman was designed for 72 to 96 dpi CRTs!

I find it hard to believe that CRTs had any influence on a typeface designed in 1931: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman

The "New" in Times New Roman is kinda like the "New" in "New York". The original York is much older, but New York is still pretty damn old.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

I find it hard to believe that CRTs had any influence on a typeface designed in 1931: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman

The "New" in Times New Roman is kinda like the "New" in "New York". The original York is much older, but New York is still pretty damn old.

Thank you.

Perhaps I'm confusing it with other typefaces MS did for Windows 3.x? Certainly MS shipped it with Windows 3.1. Those fonts were adapted for 72 to 96 dpi CRTs.

The source for this Wikipedia article is no doubt the cause of my error. I would have read something in a magazine or released with win 3.1 when I installed in 1993.

Further enhancements were introduced in Windows 3.1. The TrueType font system was introduced to provide scalable fonts to Windows applications, without having to resort on using third-party technology such as Adobe Type Manager (ATM).[4][11] Windows 3.1 introduced Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman fonts, in regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic versions, which could be scaled to any size and rotated, depending on the application

The Times New Roman common on Linux is usually from the MS corefonts package. That is a 2006 revision.
https://mscorefonts2.sourceforge.net

1998 Andale Mono	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2006 Arial: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
1998 Arial: black	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2007 Calabri: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2007 Cambria: bold, bold italic, italic	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2007 Consolas: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2007 Constantia: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2007 Corbel: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
1998 Comic: bold, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2000 Courier: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
1998 Impact	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2006 Times: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2006 Trebuchet: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
2006 Verdana: bold, bold italic, italic, regular	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789
1998 Webdings	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP abcdefghijklmnop 0123456789

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

I find it hard to believe that CRTs had any influence on a typeface designed in 1931: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman

The "New" in Times New Roman is kinda like the "New" in "New York". The original York is much older, but New York is still pretty damn old.

I thought that Times New Roman was related to the newspaper The New York Times. It was designed to be a more compact but legible typeface for their newspaper.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I thought that Times New Roman was related to the newspaper The New York Times. It was designed to be a more compact but legible typeface for their newspaper.

Close; if Wikipedia is correct (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman) it was actually the Times of London; not New York.

[DNSB]

As mentioned, the Times New Roman typeface in Windows was tweaked for the displays in use at that time.

[drofgnal]

One of my pet peeves came up again yesterday on x-ray enabled books. I bought the omnibus version of the first three Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern books. I didn't expect it to be x-ray enabled, but it was. Why then is one of the major characters not in the character list? This has happened with other books as well, like Dr Zhivago. With Dr Zhivago I had to book mark a wiki, and I did yesterday too for Dragonriders.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by drofgnal

One of my pet peeves came up again yesterday on x-ray enabled books. I bought the omnibus version of the first three Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern books. I didn't expect it to be x-ray enabled, but it was. Why then is one of the major characters not in the character list? This has happened with other books as well, like Dr Zhivago. With Dr Zhivago I had to book mark a wiki, and I did yesterday too for Dragonriders.

I like the x-ray feature on kindles and use it a lot. But it is extremely rare for me to come across an amazon supplied x-ray file that does not have large numbers egregious errors in the descriptions, missing characters, misidentified characters, etc. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=303347

The WordDumb calibre plugin does a much better job. It has similar, but fewer errors, and those errors are much easier to fix (with per book configuration entries, an iterative process). By default, it uses wikipedia with fallback to internal snippets. I mostly read non-fiction. For fiction there is the possibility for WordDumb to use fandom, but I have not been able to get that to work, presumably because I have been doing something wrong. Presumably a fandom based x-ray file would be high quality if the data in fandom for that universe is high quality. Lately, I have just been living with the default WordDumb generated x-ray files, but it would be nice custome config files were available.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Perhaps I'm confusing it with other typefaces MS did for Windows 3.x?

Yes, those were non-scalable versions of the fonts, and they looked abysmal.

Times New Roman in OpenType is a good representation of the original moveable type implementation. But, it's not a great font overall because it was designed to do what Times Roman did...save space by being narrower. To keep it readable, the x-height is higher than I prefer.