Types…

I spend the best part of my working day sat in front of a computer screen, reading, or if I'm lucky, writing. It can get monotonous, even though I have a big window obliquely to one side of me, which gives out onto the garden. Thus I can occasionally vary my focus and watch the butterflies on the buddleia, or the eucalyptus tickling the breeze; occasionally a scruffy ginger cat, with a dog-end in its gob and a battered trilby, looking for something beautiful to kill, or once in a while, a magnificent pheasant, strutting his technicolor stuff.

But mainly… staring hopefully at a screen, wondering whether I will ever be able to find the right way to finish the chapter I have stalled on halfway through, yet again. After several years of screen gawping I feel I'm something of an expert on how to cope with it, and would like to pass on what I think might be one or two Handy Tips on the subject of fonts.

I use three fonts for different things. For writing, like composing this blog, for example, I find Times New Roman to be unbeatable. The letters are big-bodied, meaning the ascenders and descenders (the tops of 't's and the bottoms of 'g's, for example), are relatively small. Think 'Vanessa Feltz'. Thus, you can fit a lot of easily readable text onto the screen. I use 14pt if I want a quick overview, but mainly I enlarge this to 150% when writing. At this size I never have to peer, and never feel I'm straining my eyes. I can read entire books on my 17" screen at this level of enlargement, with no trouble at all. Recently I read the Torah, the four Gospels, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada like this, one after the other. No problems.

The other onscreen font I use is Comic Sans. This is best, I find, for emails. TNR is too black and formal and in yer face. Comic is more relaxed and really pretty friendly (think Paul Merton, or possibly Joe Pasquale). It is roughly a million times better to write in and a trillion times better to read than that godforsaken and soulless Arial that so many of my incoming mails are in. A font size of 12 or 14pt seems to be about right to me. Why, I wonder, do the Arial fans also favour 1 or 2pt? It's a skinny typeface in the first place and is virtually invisible in small fonts, never mind unreadable. And why do so many of them favour pale blue as a colour? A boring, tiny, skinny font in a virtually invisible colour? Please reconsider if you are an Arial user!
Comic Sans, at 12pt, in navy blue, makes a mail a joy to read, even if it's only another attempt to flog me stuff to make my willy yet another three feet longer, so I can strap eight more counterfeit watches to it to boost my self confidence. But spam seems to inevitably arrive in boring Arial or similar. Suitable for the sad little lives spammers live, I suppose.

You may have noticed that a lot of website pages are set up in either Arial (or one of its clones) or Comic Sans. The former are tiring to read; the latter are a pleasure. Would you agree?

The third font I use is Garamond. This is wonderful for printed text, because it is of slender body, and uses about a half, or less, of the ink TNR would need. Also, TNR on a printed page is downright threatening, I find. It's the stuff of Summonses and Subpoenas. Garamond, however, leads the eye gently across the page, and never demands an effort of the reader. Think Darcey Bussell or Leslie Caron. It dates from the seventeenth century and has never been bettered for elegance and economy. I use 12pt for printing off documents as my printer needs only one pass to print a line, so it's light on ink and takes little time, and the results are beautifully readable.

A further possible Tip is that if you have, as I do, all your colours in one basket, so to speak, and don't do much colour printing on account of the outrageous cost of the ink, and when you do dare to print off a photo, you run the constant nuisance of having to replace all three colours when only one has run out… well…. maybe this will help…
You can keep your jets clean by occasionally printing off in 'brown'. As far as I know, brown is made by mixing all three primaries (it always was at primary school, anyway, so most of my artistic efforts ended up as being pictures of bears hiding in ploughland, or soldiers huddling face down in shell holes on the Somme) which means all three colours get drained at the same rate. And, surprisingly, the result is quite readable, printed in 12pt Garamond, naturally.

***

Yes, you've guessed. The reason I'm writing this now is because I've stalled, yet again, on my current chapter. It's supposed to be about Vibes, Instinct, and Intuition. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, you might say. I thought that myself until I started on it. After two days I had 2,000 words on the page. They read quite well, but there was a certain something missing. I spent an hour trying to work it out. Eventually intuition told me that I had been tackling the issue from the wrong end. Thus, my 2,000 words were not exactly irrelevant or wrong…. but would need a complete re-jig, with extra bits adding here and there, sometimes in mid-paragraph. In other words, the sort of editing I absolutely hate. Too complex to hold in my mind, and too ambiguous at too many points. What goes where? Why? Why not there, instead? But if there, what about X and even Y? And where the hell has Z got to?
At the rate my tiny mind can process stuff, there are several days of slog ahead, and even then it won't feel right because it will have all sort of rough edges and little gaps in the flow and so forth, and so will need constant re-visiting. Bah.

No butterflies out today: raining. No scruffy cat; probably off somewhere dealing dope. No pheasant. He must be in either his Winnebago or a fox.

Anyway… back to staring at my screenful of Times New Roman, wishing I was somewhere else.
It'll pass…. And the chapter will somehow get finished.

Then it will be onto the next chapter: The Occult. Oh, mercy…..