Typophile - Why Arno Pro instead of Adobe Jenson? - Comments

I don’t know about

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:31:03 -0700

I don’t know about *totally* different. But it has been tweaked a bit, I think.

I really look forward to the actual release of the typeface. It will ship in the boxes with the next Creative Suite and the CS applications, so the March 27th launch should reveal the availability date.

Cheers,

Welcome to Typophile! An

DanGayle — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 10:58:05 -0800

Welcome to Typophile! An interesting thing about Arno Pro, as attested by Thomas Phinney, is that the version we see is only a beta version.

When I showed him a piece of work that I did with it, it took him a second to figure it out because the current version’s lower case e is now totally different! Who would have thought that there could be more to work on that would totally change the appearance of a typeface, especially on a typeface that for anyone other than Slimbach would’ve been complete a long time ago...

Hi… it’s my debut in

Luis Moreira — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 10:29:13 -0800

Hi...
it’s my debut in typophile, and I’m happy that I start it speaking about Robert Slimbach.
As a graphic designer I must say Robert still surprises me after all those great typefaces he had done.
Arno is wonderful. Congratulations to him and to the ones who worked with him in Arno Pro.

Thanks all! While I think

Dave Bayer — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:11:02 -0800

Thanks all! While I think Arno Pro is an amazing font, I’ll stay with Warnock Pro light for math typesetting, which harmonizes well with Hermann Zapf’s Euler math fonts.

Even Warnock Pro light falls apart a bit on a 600 dpi laser printer. It looks great at 1200 dpi. Maybe in another decade fonts will be generally be a bit lighter, to match future displays and printers.

I think the details and

Miss Tiffany — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:46:48 -0800

I think the details and characteristics in Warnock were strong enough to withstand having a light caption weight. I don’t think the same can be said of Arno.

> I’m betting the rest of

Miguel Sousa — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:09:25 -0800

> I’m betting the rest of the light series simply wasn’t ready.

I worked on the production of Arno Pro, and there was never a plan for a “Light series”. Perhaps Robert thinks the design, design space or style doesn’t lend itself to it. I can ask him, if you want.

Garamond Premier Pro, Robert’s work prior to Arno Pro, only has Light Display as well.

Here’s part of a footnote

Dave Bayer — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:28:51 -0800

Here’s part of a footnote set in WarnockPro-LightCapt. It has the authority I crave in Arno Pro light caption. I’m betting the rest of the light series simply wasn’t ready.

The color is spot on…it

biddy — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:59:57 -0800

The color is spot on...it looks perfect at very small sizes. I’ve been looking for an OpenType text face such as this to buy for some time and— quite frankly, this is the best I’ve seen thus far.

> So I’m dying of

Miguel Sousa — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:43:16 -0800

> So I’m dying of curiousity to see the rest of the ArnoPro light series.

Don’t hold your breath. Arno Pro’s Light weight is only intended for Display (above 22pt) sizes.

Tiffany is right. It’d be nonsense to have a “Light Caption” weight, for example.

In my mind, “Light” is a

Miss Tiffany — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:33:15 -0800

In my mind, “Light” is a weight that can only be used at larger sizes. The details needed to maintain the design would disappear at smaller sizes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have “Light” at the smaller optical sizes.

What a beautiful font! You

Dave Bayer — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:18:40 -0800

What a beautiful font! You guys know too much; x-heights and the Venetian influence are a distraction to identifying this font. In the dimension that is pure Slimbach, without historical precedent, I see “Arno” as a contraction of “Warnock”, interpolating between that font and Minion.

I must confess to having downloaded the CS3 beta just to get a first look at Arno Pro. I use TeX and LaTeX for mathematical typesetting, so the digital equivalent of struggling to get the cellophane off the next Beatles LP is a half hour of shell scripting and writing font description files. My conclusion: I need to wait for the remaining light opticals, if they’re coming. ArnoPro-Light36pt can’t be intended for 11pt body text.

To my naive eye, light fonts seem to be in identity crisis now. Are they supposed to “look” light on the page, or offer a reasonable alternative to regular? One sees good examples of each view. I’m writing a textbook to either be viewed on screen or laser printed. After many experiments I’ve concluded that most regular fonts are too heavy, reflecting a historical traditon that predates high resolution screens and printing. The only font that I can stay with for more than an hour of writing is Warnock Pro Light.

So I’m dying of curiousity to see the rest of the ArnoPro light series. The regular has such an authority on the page, with its weight perfectly balancing the glyph shapes, that I fear the light series will opt to “look” light, and not vie for the same authority on the page.

Understandable. ‘Tis

biddy — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:37:41 -0800

Understandable. ’Tis unfortunate for the typopgraphers among us. For me its easier and involves less thought than “small text” (because the next question would be how small?). It was a novel idea though.

I figured as much. Trying to

DanGayle — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:33:00 -0800

I figured as much. Trying to spec “Arno Pro Light Italic 36 at 72pts” would confuse the heck out of a somebody. I’m glad that you guys are thinking of ways to make optical sizing more useful/understandable for average people as well as typographers.

It’s not like the old days, not that I was even alive during the old days, when spec’ing 14pt automatically meant the 14pt optical because there wasn’t a choice.

I tried to get someone to understand optical sizing, but they kept asking why Times New Roman wouldn’t do that for them in MS Word. Oh well :)

It was something we were

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:15:05 -0800

It was something we were experimenting with in pre-release versions, but it did not make it into the final fonts.

Although the new naming convention worked well for most typographers among our testers, to whom its usage was obvious, overall it caused increased confusion. Less typographically savvy users were particularly uncertain about how to deal with it.

For Adobe, it also introduced a legacy issue: what would we do with the existing fonts with the older optical-size naming convention? Either we change their style names - a major break in compatibility - or we live with two different standards.

In the end, we decided that simply keeping with the existing scheme was the best of the alternatives. For Arno, we minted a new size name of “small text” in between “caption” and “regular,” for the 10 pt optical size. Although we might come up with new names, simply prefixing “small” or “large” in front of the existing labels would give us enough optical sizes to play with for pretty much any purpose.

Cheers,

Thomas, can you say anything

DanGayle — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:41:57 -0800

Thomas, can you say anything about the optical size naming conventions used on Arno Pro? As we mentioned, some of us kinda like it. Is that where Adobe is leaning with future typefaces?

Why Arno Pro instead of Adobe Jenson?

DanGayle — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 19:42:04 -0800

I did a clean wipe of my system, and when I installed Photoshop CS3, I noticed that Arno Pro is installed. I can’t find it on the Adobe website, nor on Myfonts.com.

It’s similar to Adobe Jenson, but not as “earthy.” But now, there is no Jenson, which is one of my favorite Adobe Originals.

So:

(EDIT: Did I forget to put a space there?)

And what else is known about it?