It’s a difficult concept even for trained typographers. We don’t know what this means, whether in Cascading Stylesheets ( CSS) font definitions or here. Cursive fonts are to be used with caution by captioners, but to be provided with gusto and good taste by typefoundries. But several script typefaces are actually very easy to read at sensible sizes, and the most-abused script typeface there is, Zapf Chancery, has more variations than many sansserif fonts. Of perhaps greater concern is the immediate image that leaps to mind when “cursive” typefaces are mentioned you think of something flowery and elaborate, hence hard to read. Of course a script font could be used inappropriately by Cletus and Brandine–style captioners who think scripts are just really klassy, but that’s a separate question – one of training, not of typography. To give a highbrow example, the voice-over reading of handwritten correspondence in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence lends itself to cursive fonts. It seems ridiculous for caption fonts to include a script typeface, but in fact it makes sense for some contexts. We view the undefined category as the default font of the system far from being the least important (the font of last resort), it’s the most important. Of these families, three are cause for concern.īy definition a big nothing, manufacturers are apt to view this category as a justification for providing only seven typefaces, duplicating one of them into this category. The EIA-708 standard for captioning for high-definition television in North America requires eight caption font families:
#Agfa fonts collection full#
Separately, we have a full critique of the EIA-708 captioning specification itself available. See our collection of screenshots of HDTV and other high-end caption fonts (at Flickr). We have all sorts of contacts to assist with that task. So what do you do? Commission custom fonts (which can be exclusives to your company and clients) and test them. As you’ll see below, none of the existing font sets is good enough and none of them is backed up by research.
#Agfa fonts collection software#
If you’re a television or set-top-box or software manufacturer and you need HDTV fonts in a hurry, we cannot in good conscience recommend you buy off the shelf. And, more relevantly, they expect you to sit there and read it for hours and hours at a time for the lifetime of your television. They expect you to be happy with what they give you. These are the best fonts they think you deserve. If you’re a deaf person or another captioning viewer, keep in mind that this is all they think of you. But in one specific field, there’s already commercial competition for captioning fonts, and frankly, it’s pathetic. This makes us rather late to the game, given that everyone thinks Tiresias is all you ever need ( it isn’t). Other people’s fonts A critique of existing typefaces for HDTV (EIA-708) captioning
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