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LUC DEVROYE


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Tiresias: Critique by Joe Clark [Joe Clark]

Joe Clark (Toronto) deflates the balloon blown up by Bitstream regarding John Gill's Tiresias, which was specially developed for screen captioning. His main points:

  • It was tested on only a few dozen people, but is marketed as a font for everyone.
  • Some of the tests for this claimed caption and subtitle font used printouts, not captions or subtitles.
  • It is claimed to be superior to typefaces like Times, even though what were talking about are screenfonts, not print fonts.
  • It costs up to $17,500, but it does not even have an italic.
  • Its researchers admit to little expertise in typography, yet the researchers parent organization receives 40% of the retail price.
  • It is claimed to be a better solution to a specific problem than a generic typeface would be, but it has itself turned into a generic typeface that is misapplied to specific problems.
  • The ingenious, unique typeface has already been partially cloned, via a competing knockoff typeface with a different design and identical widths.
  • It is ugly by design.

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Movie fonts ⦿ The Canadian type scene ⦿ Readability & Legibility ⦿ Type for TV ⦿








file name: John Gill Tiresias L P Bold 2001


file name: John Gill Tiresias 2001







Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html