Hello John,

do you think there are flaws in Aldus’ appearance that needed to be improved on? Just curious if you have anything special in mind.
F

Hello Florian

No, I love Aldus! Just curious. Sometimes something is done with a later version and you do see why it was done. Perhaps ignorance is bliss! I do know that when I saw Berling Nova (a face I like very much)I saw quite clearly the improvements over Berling as was.

Of course, the most obvious changes are:

• the extended character set. Aldus Roman OT contains 408 glyphs, while Aldus nova Com Book has 677. Most of them are due to the added support of Central European languages. But Linotype also has added a number of ligatures, ordinals, superscript letters and a wider set of figures.
• the added Bold and Bold Italic

It seems every single character has been revised and altered – sometimes sightly, sometimes strikingly (Q, s, t, …).
The ascender length has been reduced drastically.
Looking at the italic f, w or y, I have to say that I liked the classic (digital) Aldus better. The new version looks less characteristic. Or less quirky? Maybe it is just a matter of getting used to the new. Maybe Aldus nova has a better colour. And it certainly does integrate better with the other Palatino nova family members.

I think it is impossible to draw any conclusions without having a couple of printed pages, in both versions with otherwise equal settings.

Btw, John D. Berry wrote an article about Hermann Zapf and the development of the Palatino nova family for creativepro.com.
F