Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 2, 2014 Deadline October 2014 Issue Font Wrangling: Take Control of Your Typefaces Too many typefaces are cluttering up printed pages, online spaces and computer drives. Hundreds, or even thousands, of fonts on our computing devices prove too tempting for some people. It’s time to wrangle your fonts and refine your designs. A high school teacher rejected the first term paper I typed into a computer. Notice that I didn’t write the paper on the computer; I entered text I had written on paper. I sought to avoid the hassles of using correction fluid with my typewriter by switching to the computer and its dot-matrix printer. Despite using the “letter quality” mode of my Epson printer, the built-in font looked odd. The teacher complained that the lowercase g, p and q were squished and lines of ink smudges were unacceptable. Unless you could afford a daisy-wheel printer with its typewriter mechanism, a personal computer was an ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 2010 Issue April 1, 2010 Capturing Memories: Comparing Photo Printers Every spring my wife and I head out in the Jeep with our camera bags packed, in pursuit of wildflowers and waterfalls. She is a serious amateur photographer with a good digital SLR camera, an assortment of lenses and filters, and a tripod I get to carry when we hike. The resulting pictures are often spectacular on screen. If only the printed versions of the photos were as stunning. But, the reality is that most printers are designed for affordable printing, which is quite different from printing archival-quality photographs. Small office inkjet and laser printers were never intended for serious photographers. Realizing we need a true film-quality printer, I spent the last few months researching printing technologies and reading printer reviews. In the end, we went to a local camera store and compared color and black-and-white photo prints with our own eyes. Dye-Sublimati...