I just thought of you a few minutes ago whilst searching for documentary films.

You may be horrified to learn that I'm downloading a full length documentary film on <fonts>.

Yes, fonts.

I hadn't considered this an important issue until you single handedly rescued me from the "Times New Roman" gaffe- a gaffe so huge that I cannot watch one single second of any of my videos from the New Roman Era.

Also, as you well know, you and I are currently engaged in a bitter, yet life-affirming, "war" over which font, exactly, to use, in our emails to each other.

Ohai!

Oh noes. Even more fonts?! Heresy! there is only one True Font, and that's Verdana. Utter perfection is Verdana 10, but Verdana 12 will do for variety in a pinch.

As a last resort, Arial 10 or 12 can probably be considered sortof acceptable.

According to the documentary, which consisted of many interviews with graphic designers, <Helvetica> is the best font.

<tpstar: <What are the cg.com fonts?>>

Copied from the page source:

<font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica>

This, as far as I know, means that the default font is Verdana; if the viewer's computer doesn't recognize the Verdana font (fat chance...), they will see Arial instead, and if their computer doesn't recognize Arial either, they will see Helvetica instead, if they have that. After that, they are on their own, font-wise. :p

I approve, of course. ;)

<Jess> Helvetica is a very pretty font indeed - however, my computer doesn't have it installed (so I can only see it if shown in a picture...) and since I haven't tampered with the fonts on this computer, this probably means that a lot of other computers don't have Helvetica installed either, in which case they will see something awful, such as Times New Roman or Courier New instead, wherever Helvetica is specified as the font type. Which is likely the reason most websites prefer to default to the more commonly installed, i.e. recognized, Verdana and Arial fonts.

<Jess> - in other news, today Vladimir dropped by and we went over your list of Russian names - so I can finally get to recording the list, this weekend if not before. :)

<Dom> and <Jess> - <The Boris Mystery - Solved!>

First, anecdote - just a few days ago, I answered the phone at work, and a man's voice, with a heavy Russian accent, said 'Hello, this is BO-ris speaking'.

I remembered, just in time, to say 'Hello' rather than 'Thanks'. ;s

But now, for the actual facts: <Dom> - you were right.

Going over the list today, with clear instructions to pronounce all names the Russian way, Vladimir goes 'Ba-REES Spassky'.

So... 'Hold it' I say, 'everybody here always pronounces it as BO-ris! What's up with that?'

'Uh,' he says 'I think it's because we're trying to fit in with the Israeli accent?'

I'm very excited to get the next round of Russkie names- when you have the chance, no hurry from this end.

I won't be making any soundtrack recordings for <Nezhmetdinov> for a week yet= or longer if necessary.

The documentary I watched was actually called <Helvetica> so maybe it was biased.

At any rate, I learned that helvetica is by far the most used font in the world on "signage" which means "signs".

heh

As in signs on stores, or on signs.

One of the most interesting things about the documentary was just how much thought and time and design goes in to these fonts- and how various art schools fight over which one is best, or which one should be promoted.

In terms of general history, Helvetica is considered most significant because it embodied a post-World War II desire for "neutrality" "clarity" and "democracy" in Roman Alphabet printing.

"According to akanie, an unaccented 'o' is pronounced 'a' in the syllable immediately preceding the accent and 'uh' as in 'but' elsewhere".

As far as I can tell, both in Boris and in Viktor, the o seems to be the vowel in 'but'.

<Jess: <The documentary I watched was actually called <Helvetica> so maybe it was biased.>>

Possibly, just a little bit! ;)

Srsly, Helvetica <is> a very good font for large signs "IRL", but it doesn't seem to have caught on as much in the world of computers. And a font that your average, store-assembled, computer doesn't have installed, is a font website designers will want to avoid, because if they use "uncommon" fonts most people will not be seeing their pages as they mean them to look like.

I only downloaded it once though.

They all sound beautiful to me- I really can't emphasize enough how important your work here is to the project.

Please thank "Mr. Russia" on my behalf as well...

QUESTION:

"Rashid"

You gave the Russian pronunciation.

The Tatar pronunciation is identical except the last consonant is pronounced as a "t" rather than "d".

Which one should I use for the film?

I'll pass your thanks on next time I see him. :)

About <Rashid>, not sure. The conventional 'd' might be better...

If you show the name in a caption, chances are many of your viewers won't even notice if Richard says it as 't' - they'll be expecting to hear a 'd', so that's what they'll "hear", or else, even if they notice it, they'll put it down to some speech impediment.

Back in the day, when comp memory wasn't quite what it is today, I had an entire computer devoted to fonts. Every known version of the Latin alphabet, plus diacritics, Hebrew, Arabic, ten versions of Cyrillic and two versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Don't think I ever got round to Hangul.

As they do... ;)

Then I graduated to 1980s versions of Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. Which could handle straight lines, boxes and columns, but couldn't bend text into the odd shapes I wanted.

Also, before there was a proper internet, some fonts could be hard to find and acquire copies of. So whenever I met somebody's Mac, I checked its OS and copied any unfamiliar fonts to disc.

The reason I had a computer devoted to these was that, once they were all on board, it couldn't really do anything else.

<Dom: <I *did* run my own press, at least in the sense of bringing out zines on paper.>>

Oh, right, you told me about that. :) I didn't match up the time periods for some reason.

I remember Letrasets too, from the days of my architecture studies - they were still in use then, as the field was slow to enter the computer age here. AutoCad was only introduced in my last year or two of studies. I loved it, of course. :D

Thankfully, by the time I started working in architecture (I took a detour in other directions between finishing the arch. studies and starting work in the field, as some of you may recall), AutoCad was everywhere.

<Thank you for services to truth and slavic orthoepy>

Each letter add change how word are spoken, provide some confuse for a few whiles. Wonder of other languages that done the same.

The human/machine language Marain, in the 'Culture' novels by Iain M. Banks, also comes to mind.

I also recall an English SF novel - maybe The Embedding, by Ian Watson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Wa...(author) - in which a bunch of alien traders arrive on Earth, happy to share technology - if we happen to have anything of value to exchange. It turns out that that the only 'product' which might interest the rest of the galaxy is an obscure language from the Amazon jungle, with a rare self-referential structure...

That reminded me of the surrealist Raymond Roussel and his two-way influence relationship with SF - he was influenced by Jules Verne, and in turn influenced Ballard and other imaginative writers.

It seems they had an academic conference on this very subject just a few months ago. I always discover these things too late.

This is an extract from a paper that I found at http://www.snarke.com/2010/02/disch...:

<Anatole Broyard says that “Language was both a luxury and a discipline for Barthes. He pursued a subject through language until he cornered it, until its disguise fell away and it was revealed in a kind of epiphany.”

Delany is like Barthes. Delany prods, squeezes and sniffs at language—like a chef buying fruit and vegetables. He munches distinctions. His sentence rhythms are those of a man who talks with his hands.

Disch’s “Angouleme” is like Delany’s disco “Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” Both are hybrid short stories. They’re like neo-noir matter-of-fact boutiques of alternate lifestyles—attractive to those who celebrate sex, drugs and the right wardrobe.

The cyberpunk component of sci-fi today is already history—post-Neuromancer and post-Pattern Recognition storylines are just as outdated with the new audience of adolescent and collegiate Wi-Fi wayfarers of today. Delany’s disco partygoers were pre-cyberpunk—while Gibson’s hackers and nerds of yesteryear are history now.>

You tend to be right - or at least not wrong - about such things, therefore I had to entertain the hypothesis that I might actually be mistaken in the matter of Boris-pronouncing. And yet I knew what I'd heard, even if I couldn't be sure where I heard it.

A couple of split-the-difference ideas came to mind. One was that I had read or heard instructive material for some sub-group of English speakers, who wouldn't be able to reproduce an unstressed 'o' unless they were told it was really an 'a'.

You're right, it's idiotic.

The other was that Russians - everywhere? - regardless of ambient language and writing system? - drift towards the expected 'o' sound when not speaking Russian. That, in fact, what turns Boris into ba-rees is the clump of slavic phonemes in the vicinity.

Russian apparently does that with 'o' at least. More to the point, any language described as <phonetic> (pronounced exactly as written) is one that <doesn't> do that.

<Dom: <or maybe the things that chess is there, buffering, to protect us from.>>

In a nutshell, the protection chess provides could most likely be summarized as the fact that "IRL" the rules of interaction are not that simple and clear-cut. Which is pretty prosaic, per se, but I suppose one could turn it into a SF premise by positing a situation where the reality being buffered against would be a truly extraordinary one. :)