Unfortunately, none of the above are available. uses more that 3Mb of storage space) or an excess of processing cycles. This scheme would require either large amounts of disk storage capacity (Helvetica 160pt. Ideally, the formatter should have access to any point size.

They come in roman, italic and roman bold variations and can be scaled to any size. Two proportionally spaced font families are available Helvetica and Century-Schoolbook. , and without the use of soft fonts on the display it would be much harder to claim competitiveness with paper.Īll soft fonts used in the Electronic Publishing group are derived from 320x320x1 pixel master fonts, which corresponds to a pointsize of 230 on the 2k display. Ergonomic studies show that they are easier to read This is important to properly render the letter forms, as well as position the letter forms on the display. Soft fonts don't improve resolution, but rather, improve addressibility of the existing resolution. Instead, the characters are scaled onto a continuous space any partly covered pixel by the edge of a character is quantized into a grayscale value. The monitor is no longer considered a discrete device with a fixed matrix driving it. Grayscale fonts introduce a new way of thinking about text on computer displays. This file format is the starting point for the formatting process that ends in the rendered pixmap displayed on the screen.Īll text rendered by the formatter uses soft fonts, also known as fuzzy fonts, antialiased fonts or grayscale fonts The descriptor file contains various information relating to the data file, e.g., the headline, author (if known) and source. When used to store news articles, the data file contains the content of the article. A datfile is technically a UNIX file system directory that contains a descriptor file and a data file. The common intermediate file format used as a starting point for the formatter is based on the 'datfile' standard. Therefore, they are first transferred into a common intermediate ASCII-based format developed for the Newspace project. The articles all come in electronic form, but there is no established standard format. The Newspace project receives approximately 3000 articles a day from around 10 different sources. Margins are minimal, and the overall impression is 'dark'.

There is a minimum of white space, and headline fonts are often condensed. Newspapers use a high word density while legibility suffers.

Before it selects the number of columns, the formatter should know what headline font is to be used-we're back where we started.Īnother dilemma one faces when formatting text is legibility vs. To know the width of an article the formatter must know the number of columns. For example, when selecting which headline font to use, it is, among other things, important to know how wide the article will be. Typography is a key issue.Ī general problem when formatting news articles is that not all information is available when one needs it. The formatted 'image' contains elements of the newspaper metaphor, e.g., a headline, source indication, columns etc. The purpose of the formatting process is to take an ASCII-based text, with optional illustrations, and render it into a pixmap that can directly be displayed on a bit-mapped computer screen.

Most popular newspaper headline font