Nicest Fonts to use with iSilo 4.x

[Alexander Turcic]

Have been experimenting with the font feature in the latest iSilo 4 beta. Currently I have the following Fonts installed on my OS4 Clie:

Book Antiqua (TT converted with iSiloX) - nice
Bookman Old Style (TT converted with iSiloX) - seems a bit too wide wasting space
Garamond (TT converted with iSiloX) - nice
Times New Roman (TT converted with iSiloX) - ok
Bell MT (from PalmReaderPro) - beautiful
Gill Sans MT (from PalmReaderPro) - ok
Utah MT Condensed (from PalmReaderPro) - beautiful

Note that your PalmReaderPro fonts will not work in the current beta 1, but in the next beta of iSiloX 4.0.

Wonder what fonts you like best...

[radleyp]

Glad you are having such wonderful luck, Alexander. Wish I could join you, BUT

when I try to convert fonts in iSiloX, I get an error message and the program closes down, AND

indeed the PalmReaderPro fonts do not work,

SO I am stuck with the default font, whatever it is. radleyp

[volcanopele]

I have been using Arial. To be perfectly honest I haven't really played around with fonts for iSilo other than to try Times New Roman, Arial, and Tahoma. Arial looks most like the fonts used on my browser at home while Tahoma looks most like the fonts used on my browser at work.

[madmaxmedia]

Hi,

This is a great thread, first thing I thought of when I read about new font support!

The trick here is making a functional font that is attractive as possible, rather than vice versa.

My current system font (and thus display font for iSilo 3.x) is HandEra Bold 16 (I think that's the right size). Letters are narrower to fit more character in a line, but bolded for better legibility on the Sony hi-res screen.

I notice when I make a regular font without including the bold versions, iSilo reader can 'create bold' versions. But if I make just the bold versions, iSilo reader doesn't create bold versions of those. I am trying this because single pixel width characters are harder to read on the CLIE.

Can you get around this somehow?

Also- Frutiger Linotype also shows up quite nicely, if you convert smaller size, or set font size on iSilo reader to "Smaller".

Thanks,
Steve

[madmaxmedia]

I've also found that by manually adjusting screen density, you can alter the size of the "normal" font size on the reader. This allows me to select an optimal font size for "normal", so I don't have to change the defaults just because I converted a new font.

Also- I can save the new font to file, but when I select the option to install via Hotsync, it is not added to the install queue

[sfringer]

I've found that Verdana does a nice job for me. (Garamond, too, is nice).

I'm using FontBucket-based fonts, since I have them installed already for Quickoffice. It's nice that I can share those resources across the apps!

Definitely a nice update to a slick program.

Scott

[radleyp]

I see, on another thread, that the bug I reported above, is a recognized problem. So I'll just wait for the new beta. radleyp

[TadW]

I have been playing with the new font feature and still didn't get the relation between font pt size (iSiloX) and font size definitions - smallest, smaller, medium, larger, largest (iSilo).

So for instance, I could create a font set in iSiloX with various sizes, but how does that determine my outcome in iSilo?

[madmaxmedia]

The screen density setting also affects display size, but I'm not sure how they're related.

If you pick a bunch of large font numbers on purpose, you'll find that it uses those fonts. It probably looks for a certain font size for each display setting (Smallest, Smaller, Medium, etc...) and if it can't find the right size it will take the next closest one.

[TadW]

Thanks, I guess I have to play a little bit around with converting the same font using different font sizes.

Something else: iSilo supports various Font types, namely

• Default
• Sans Serif
• Serif
• Monospace

Can someone explain the difference in those types? I noticed that in most cases the fonts in my documents change when I apply changes to Sans Serif only.

Tad

[Alexander Turcic]

Sans-Serif:
A serif is the tiny stroke at the end of the main strokes of a font character. A font family that does not have these serifs is called a sans-serif font. Sans-serif fonts are best used online, as they are easier to read there. On the Web serifs can make the fonts more difficult to read, especially at small sizes, but sans-serif fonts do not have this problem.

Examples: Arial, Arial Black, Impact, Trebuchet MS, Verdana (nice one), Helvetica, Arial Rounded, VAG Rounded, Avant Garde, Century Gothic, Optima, Omega, Zapf Humanist, Univers, Zurich, ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Serif:
A serif is the tiny stroke at the end of the main strokes of a font character. A font family that has these serifs is called a serif font.
Serif fonts are best used in print, as they are easier to read there. On the Web the serifs can make these fonts more difficult to read, especially at small sizes, as most computer monitors don't have the resolution to display them clearly.

Examples: Georgia, Times New Roman, Palatino (nice one), Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Times, Garamond, ITC Stone Serif

Monospace:
A monospace font looks like a typewriter font.
Each letter takes up the same width and the rest - including i and w. Monospace fonts are best used to define code and preformatted text.

Examples: Andale Mono, Courier New, Courier

For smaller displays like PDA displays sans-serif fonts should produce the most legible output. Serifs tend to break up at small text sizes, resulting in poor legibility.

Or maybe you want to see a more scientific approach to fonts.

[Alexander Turcic]

At About.com you can find a top 10 list of "crisp, clean, uncluttered" sans-serif fonts.

I forgot, they also have a top 10 list of serif fonts, here.

[Maceo]

After having payed around with some fonts, in my opinion, the original Palm font in its hires incarnation is the best compromise between legibility/readability and efficiency.

What it lacks is character - which, also in my opinion, is hard to portray in a few pixels and most likely a flexibility feature.

Four free fonts that work very well even at small font sizes on the TT were created by Microsoft exactly for low res displays: Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet and Tahoma. These have custom-tweaks for low resolutions. Creating them for the Palm via iSiloX is easy, so give it a try. They are not really exciting, but they work.

When sub-pixel rendering is introduced in iSilo (something that Darren told me he would investigate), there might be more potential for expression that does not destroy legibility.

[sfringer]

Interesting on the sub-pixel rendering possibility. If Darren does go that route, any chance he might investigate implementing Blue Nomad's FineType font system? (Or possibly make those fonts usable by iSilo)?

Scott

[Alexander Turcic]

Attached you find the Verdana Sans-Serif font (for 144dpi devices) that I converted as following:

8pt Plain, Bold, Italic
10pt Plain, Bold, Italic
12pt Plain, Bold, Italic
18pt Plain
20pt Plain

I chose 5 sizes so that iSilo can fully utilitze its five relative sizes (smaller...largest) if necessary. The 12pt size is for standard reading.

Also, the reason why I added Bold and Italic to the three smaller sizes is because I figured that they look somewhat better than iSilo synthesized style replacements. On the other hand, I left them out from the two largest sizes to keep the total font filesize smaller and also because you normally don't have text that big except e.g. for headers. I completely left out the Bold-Italic style because it occurs too rarely to justify the additonal gain in filesize. iSilo's synthesized fonts look good enough for that.

PS: I am still not sure why for some documents, when I change the relative size e.g. from medium to larger, nothing happens to the actual document font size. Maybe the gap between 12pt and 18pt is too big? Any help here?