One thing I learned

[randy_byers]

Finished the printing of AmaZed and CorfluZed last night. One thing I learned is that carl packs a lot of text onto a page of Chunga. When I printed Chunga last year I burned through black toner like it was tinder. AmaZed and CorfluZed used very little black toner in comparison, even accounting for the much smaller print run. I'm not sure that the Chunga layout has less white space than Luke's lovely layout in AZ&CZ either. It's all about the density of the text. I would never have guessed it would make that big of a difference, although carl has long said that he fits a hell of a lot of words into our pages. Nothing like empirical evidence to bring the truth home.

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Any chance you could e-mail me a pdf?

Yours,
Instant Gratification Junkie

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The PDF should be in your inbox by now. Let me know if it's not.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Landed safely, thanks, although I was actually thinking of Chunga: my fault for not being more explicit.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that. The next issue of Chunga, with your piece, is still in the works. I was talking about the previous issue, which came out last year.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

No problem. At least I was able to confirm Nic Farey is still spreading lies about my interaction with his dodgy toilet lock. Revenge shall be mine.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. By the way, I've edited my post to clarify what I was actually printing last night. I could see that it was easy to read it the way you did.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm easily CorfluZed.

[wrdnrd]

Oh, well done.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

A slightly smaller font size, or a slightly tighter leading, would make a big difference over several pages. Actually, I'm a little curious to get a breakdown of the layout differences from carl. Or I could do a comparison on my own. Hah!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's all magic to me, but I'm pretty sure the font carl uses for Chunga is specially designed to pack as much text as possible into as little space as necessary. As I recall, it's a variant on the font he designed/tweaked for Apparatchik, which also packed a lot of text into a small space and had considerably less white space than Chunga. I've noticed in my own random experiments with the fonts that come with MS Word that different fonts occupy significantly different amounts of territory. I'm pretty sure that Garamond uses less space than Times New Roman, for example. (Although I could be misremembering.)

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I'm a Trebuchet man myself. Used to like Tahoma when I had access for an office laser printer, but it doesn't photocopy well (the verticals get really thin).

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Just gave it a go in Word, and they both look good. Trebuchet is probably more my style than Tahoma. I was able to confirm that Garamond takes up less space than either, although Tahoma comes closest. Seems like elsewhere I've seen Georgia held up as a good font for fanzines. May have been jerrykaufman, but I seem to recall that typographical rock star John D. Berry agreed.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

According to my friend peterwright, who designed the font for recent editions of the Almanach de Gotha, Trebuchet was designed to look good both on the screen and on paper.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ah, that might explain why it's called Trebuchet MS in Word. Wikipedia confirms that it was designed by Vincent Connare for Microsoft in 1996.

[wrdnrd]

See, this is what i love about zines -- rampant typeface neepery. Over beers at Big Time back in august, Alex, her friends, Andy, and i got to geeking out over Pantone colors.

Ahhh, this is the life.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Did I ever send you a copy of the last Science-Fiction Five-Yearly? One of the things we included (it was Geri's idea) was a Pantone chip -- a different one for every copy of the zine, of course.