Re: condensed, again

On Tuesday 11 March 2008, Felix Miata wrote:
> Is there some sort of mission statement that defines why particular
> family names and characteristics are as they are?
>
> 1-It seems Sans is designed to substitute for the very large x-height
> Verdana, while Serif is much larger for any given size than any other
> common web font, such as Georgia. Shouldn't Serif be smaller in
> apparent size than Vera Serif was, a little closer in apparent size
> to Georgia so that it could be a more natural substitute?

I don't think Vera was designed to be a substitute for anything. It was 
designed as a good screen font, readable at small sizes (okay, so was 
Georgia) and Serif is just the serif counterpart of Sans, and its 
metrics are quite similar to it.

But we took never part in the design process of Vera, so I guess it's 
better to ask the designer instead of us. We're just the Vera 
forkers 

> 2-Condensed seems very little narrower at many sizes than Book. e.g.,
> Sans Condensed is in many px sizes significantly larger than
> Liberation Sans, scalable Helvetica, and Arial. Condensed size is
> listed as 87. Why is that? Wouldn't a meaningfully narrower 75 make
> more sense, more like Nimbus Sans L and other narrow and/or condensed
> fonts are? IOW, a 13% reduction from standard doesn't seem very
> condensed. Should condensed be narrowed to 75, or maybe an extra
> condensed added at 75?

We create our condensed fonts automagically, and that means it's not 
really up to par with doing this work manually (which would basically