ludwig_sears

In the discussion about safe cross-platform fonts for MAX patchers, some comments were made about the relative beauty and readability of different ones. I didn't want to hijack the topic by giving my own suggestion, as mine is strictly Mac-only. It's an unlikely candidate... permit a geezer to digress a moment...

I used to use Arial Rounded Semi-bold as I found it compact and easy to read. I'm pushing 55 and my eyes tire more quickly if a font isn't somewhat bold.

But then I happened upon an info window somewhere that showed me the Arial font is a Microsoft product. Horrors. Trepidation. I'm not as pure and free of the evil enemy as I'd thought I was. (That's right, you're reading the rantings of a fanatic...)

After some searching through Fontbook, I discovered a happy solution: Apple Li Gothic Medium! It's a Chinese font and is listed way down near the end. The Roman characters of that font, in size 14 (much smaller than it sounds), are very elegant, well-rounded, and just heavy enough. Nothing looks quite as good, to me -- give it a try! The object boxes are even given a tiny bit of extra space at the top through which you can pass patchcords if need be with no fuss. There's an occasional odd spacing between a few letters, but nothing really distracting. And I find it cool sometimes to name my values or subpatchers with an option-keystroke combination (there are myriads of them) which results in a Chinese character. And yes, MAX understands and differentiates between them, even if you can't...

Re: Fonts, no hijacker, but a fanatic