Faking it

After the post at reference 1, I got a flier from Dignity in Dying, a campaigning organisation which I very much support. But a flier which got my hackles up, touching as it did on a bête noire of mine, the use of computer typefaces which fake handwriting.

Which is not quite what this is, that is to say a reproduction of a letter on which someone - a someone whom I would guess was no longer very used to writing by hand - has written some comments. The sort of thing that might have happened in the olden days of the type written memoranda and paper files of the old civil service.

Now it might catch the eye, but for some reason I find this technique rather irritating, perhaps because of the rather crafted, rather manufactured spontaneity and sincerity. But not really sure why, nor have I come up with a way of doing much the same thing in some less irritating way. Perhaps the lady writing the comments should simply have written her own missive?

Furthermore, in parallel with my hackles rising, I read in the NYRB about how the use of something called the Frutiger font on leaflets explaining some of the mysteries of the US benefits system - more extensive than you might think - lifted take-up of those benefits. It seeming that the problem in the US is not benefit abuse, rather the reverse, benefit uptake. For some reason, probably because of the foregoing, I assumed that this Frutiger must be one of the fake handwriting fonts, but checking, I find that this is not the case at all. Just a modern, sans serif, typeface, albeit not one to be found among the hundreds offered with my version of Microsoft Word, despite the talk of Microsoft at reference 3.

But it remains a puzzle why serifs are now a bad thing, having been invented in the first place as an aid to reading the printed word, possibly a bit smudged and possibly by candlelight. A puzzle for another day.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/economy-with-truth.html.

Reference 2: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface).