These fonts would be “hinted” for better on-screen display, but many applications and operating systems largely ignore these hints. Before laying down any hard cash on hinted fonts you’ll want to ask Linotype for a waterfall screen grab of the font in use in your app/OS combination/s and judge for yourself if it’s worth the extra money.

Thanks, that sounds a useful precaution! I’ll see if I get a response from them.

I don’t have Quark 7, but for the past several versions Adobe has bundled InDesign with a bunch of Kozuka Pro fonts for Japanese. Given the size of East Asian fonts, and the complications flowing therefrom, I’d be wary of using the Japanese fonts for alphabetic text.

Good luck!
David

The XSF hinting is primarily beneficial for corporate/office use, i.e., Microsoft Word on a PC. In a big bank or financial institution, there is a lot of reading going on in just this environment. I’d say that XSF’s intended audience is people like this.

If you fit a different group, non-XSF might be your bag. Check to make sure that—if you do go with other fonts—that you pick a format that has the character set support you need (especially if you are are working with Eastern European languages, etc).

I’m not at all convinced that the XSF fonts would look significantly any better in:
- major Adobe graphics applications on any platform (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)
- Any other OS X applications
- Windows applications when ClearType is enabled

In other words, that extra hinting is mainly useful for Office applications running on Windows XP and earlier, with ClearType off.

Don’t get me wrong, btw. Where it matters, it can make a very big difference. It’s just that there are an increasing number of environments where it may not matter very much.

Regards,

T

Thanks for the responses. Does anyone have any experience of the XSF fonts when used in web applications - particularly pdf files that are accessed via a company website?

You could come at this from the other angle and maybe take a look at Adobe originals - these are most likely to render best in PDF viewers and would have had the most testing in that scenario.

I shall investigate!