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The Clearview thread

Started by BigMattFromTexas, August 03, 2009, 05:35:25 PM

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Which do you think is better: Highway Gothic or Clearview?

Highway Gothic
Clearview

vdeane

Quote from: Bobby5280 on September 20, 2022, 11:11:30 PM
$500 or $800 is expensive for a graphic designer with a road sign fetish. The same cost is small for a state highway agency, turnpike authority, municipal government or even many commercial sign companies.
Is that $500-800 for a site license or per each user?
Please note: All comments here represent my own personal opinion and do not reflect the official position of NYSDOT or its affiliates.


Bobby5280

#2126
A single site license for 1 computer is $795 for the full 13 font family (W and B series weights). A license for 2-5 computers is $1495. The cost per computer continues to decline as more user licenses are purchased at once. A multi site license costs more than a single site license. You can see the specifics under the font family buying options at the Terminal Design web site.

Quote from: J N WinklerAIUI, the Roadgeek versions of both the FHWA series and Clearview originated as auto-traces to sidestep copyright restrictions.  However, for the FHWA series, the traces were produced by rasterizing the embedded vector images of the letter glyphs in the alphabets section of Standard Highway Signs at very high resolution, so there are few redundant points and they can be seen only at high magnification.  When FHWA published the Clearview supplement, the glyphs were embedded as fairly low-resolution rasters, so there were no vectors to rasterize and then trace, and there is a fair amount of roughness that is visible without zooming in.

I remember having a FHWA Clearview supplement PDF that had the fonts embedded in the document. But it was password protected at the document editing level; if someone tried opening or placing a page in Adobe Illustrator they would get hit with a password block. Of course there are ways to break password protections in PDFs, but doing so is not exactly legal or ethical.

Adobe Illustrator has a very handy ability to convert any embedded fonts in a placed PDF into raw vector outlines by using the Flatten Transparency command and dialog box.

Quote from: J N WinklerThis said, I use Roadgeek Clearview despite having access to better renderings because letter heights are consistent throughout the font family (i.e., at my working font size of 24 point in CorelDraw, uppercase X is the same height for all fonts).  I do have to use a separate file to assemble Clearview legend blocks because line height is different for Roadgeek Clearview (I don't know if this issue comes from the fonts themselves or CorelDraw) and not all lowercase letters are trimmed to capital letter height.

I have not noticed anything odd about the actual Clearview Highway fonts in terms of letter sizing between different weights. For example, if I set lettering in Clearview with a capital letter M-height of 4" that 4" height will stay the same regardless which style is selected. And the lowercase x-height will be 3.264" across all 13 weights too. The point sizes are all the same (416.787). I have lots of other fonts where physical heights of letters will vary slightly as different styles are selected. In sign design I literally size letters in inches and according to cap-letter height, not the point size of an invisible Em square.

Various letters in the Clearview Highway family do overshoot certain boundaries. It's common for round characters like a capital "O" to dip below the baseline and rise above the cap height line. Letters like the lowercase "l" rise above the cap-height line. That's a design convention of that "office sans" style of typefaces. The tops and bottoms of letters like "E" or "x" conform precisely to the baseline, x-height line and M-height line.

I lobbied and succeeded at getting Adobe to add some font height variation options in Adobe Illustrator to make it easier to use for sign design purposes. You can size letters the traditional way or turn on options to size them by cap-height, lowercase height, the Em box or ICF box. Adobe also added a large canvas mode, making it possible to have layouts as big as 2275" X 2275"; the previous limit was 227" X 227". They still need to add an align to baseline function for type objects. CorelDRAW has had that ability for the longest time.

FLAVORTOWN

#2127
Is VDOT sticking with Clearview or are they considering switching back to Highway Gothic? Was surprised to see I-66 Exit 71 signs replaced with Highway Gothic font

EDIT: It looks like these I-66 signs were built when Clearview interim approval was temporarily pulled and are just being put up now. I guess any new signs being made going forward will be Clearview, the new I-66 Exit 69 signs are in Clearview.



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