I have seen the drawings for Nomina
and it beats the previous L. Mandel ‘Galfra.’
Check : http://www.demacchi.it/

AS

Tiff: Lightweights, my dear.  :-)

Nomina is a god.

More soon…

hhp

OK, some off the top of my head:
Bell Centennial
Retina
Yellow (honorable mention)
Adsans
Galfra (a landmark design)
Nomina
Colorado
Delia
Amplitude (untested)

But I’ll look in my “lo-fi” folder for more.

hhp

Oh, and Rialto Pressa, duh.

Plus maybe some of WAD’s experimentals.
And Fleishman’s misunderstood jewels.

hhp

Meta can take a beating

Regardless of what Hrant thinks, it can. If you avoid the Normal weight (too thin, mistake in first digital version) and use the Book, set it +3 units in Quark (i.e. 15 in InDesign), it works really well at sizes around 8pt and below. It was, after all, designed for the German Post Office to be used on their forms. The original version in 1985 was made for typesetting on cathode tube machines which only had 1200 dpi resolution and would often output at less to save time. I

Well, I didn’t say it fared poorly, I just can’t see it included in a “best at lo-fi” list. To me many of the things that make Meta good (like its narrowness, and its “g”) work against it in “trench warfare”.

hhp

like its narrowness, and its “g”

Well, of course I have my own single-decker g for those occasions. And the narrowness is not a problem as long as you track properly.

BTW: FF Unit is tracked very openly and appears not quite as narrow as Meta. Works well, too.

Generally, of course, the wider the letters, the more open the counters, the more legible and the less danger of spots. But always at the expense of space. I once made Meta set at 103%. That helped, and it was still 10% more economical than Helvetica.

PS:

Here it is: FF Meta with an alternative g.

Eric, will this alternate g ever be made available to the general public?

So far, there are only these 3 weights. They were made for the admin people at MetaDesign way back in 1996 because the double-g looked spotty on screen (these were the old days with small screens and bad rendering). That is exactly the point Hrant made about that character causing problems in adverse conditions.

If we did an alternate g for all the weights of Meta, it would be a nightmare to distribute. You would have to double the number of fonts overnight! And we

But is it Meta without that “g”?  :->

hhp

“it works really well at sizes around 8pt and below”

So one could quite happily set a phone book with Meta, without any customisation (bar ‘g’) and it will perform as well, if not better than most phone book types?

What about Retina?

In my list?
BTW, I can only add one more for now: Clottes (also by Mandel).

So Kris, you’re wondering most about phone books? Because the width constraint there actually creates a stong tension against the need to make type wide at small sizes. BTW, every lo-fi freak needs to read Tracy’s “Telephone Directories” article in issue #15 of the old series of Typographica (1958), pp 4-15. He even shows non-Latin stuff.

hhp

So one could quite happily set a phone book with Meta, without any customisation (bar ‘g’) and it will perform as well, if not better than most phone book types?

It was designed for phone books et al. Never really tried and tested, but i have a few illustrations from 1985, showing Helvetica (actually: Holsatia from Hell), electronically condensed, and an early version of Meta, uncondensed. Very unrefined, but we could set narrower columns, get more columns on the page and save around 8% content. And that was without any customisation. But the German Post Office decided to stick with Helvetica and its bastard sisters until 3 years ago, when they joined the Frutiger bandwaggon.
+++ jpeg +++ 55006 +++ phonebook
before +++

here

Oh Frutiger! That would probably work, too. And Cisalpin, Felix Arnold’s new cartography face, would probably work in a telephone book as well.

http://www.linotype.com/93833/cisalpin-family.html

Don’t forget Matthew Carter’s Bell Centennial:
http://www.linotype.com/121/bellcentennial-family.html

Dan, did you marry Kathy Lee Gifford yesterday?

hhp

Huh? I don’t keep tabs on Kathy Lee Gifford anymore. Did she get married again yesterday? Must have been another Dan Reynolds (sadly a common namee… at least I’ve managed to break into the first page of Dan Reynolds’ on Google, though… I’m not the creationist guy, the illustrator, or the musician).

Here’s another Tracy gem:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/maximus/
But not for phone books, more for newspaper classifieds.

hhp

Meta can take a beating.
Bell Gothic can take a beating.

I’ll bet anything with traps can take a beating, Asphalt for instance.

:^P okok point made. i didn’t dig deep enough.

Eric, will this alternate g ever be made available to the general public?

=^D

Well then, here’s to hoping for opentype Meta. :^)