A face-lift for your faxes - Technology Information

Home Office Computing, March, 1996 by Roger C. Parker

FAXING IS PROBABLY THE number-one way to send business correspondence, but how many legible faxes do you receive? Probably not too many, if your luck is anything like mine. Last week, in fact, I received the ultimate indignity: a fax printed entirely in UPPERCASE LETTERS. It was depressing to look at and nearly impossible to read--and if it hadn't come from a friend, it would've gone directly into the wastebasket.

To prevent your faxes from suffering such a fate, let's take a look at the determining factor of a fax's legibility: the typeface. It has always amazed me that companies that have no problem spending thousands of dollars creating fancy four-color annual reports, brochures, and other marketing materials can completely overlook the design of their faxes, which reflect the company image on a daily basis.

What's the big deal? Well, remember that you have absolutely no control over how your fax is going to be reproduced and read. When you print a letter that you're going to mail, you choose the output device, you choose the paper, and you eyeball the final copy. Not so with faxes: The page that looks perfect on your end can fall prey to thermal paper, a low-resolution machine, or if the recipient has a fax/modem, a low-resolution screen. If you don't believe me, try sending a fax to yourself Oust use your fax machine's copy button). See how the rounded letters fill in, the thin strokes break up, and the thick ones blob together? Now imagine that the recipient's fax machine is even worse than yours.

Put Your Best Face Forward First, some don'ts. Don't use script, calligraphy, outline, or any other kind of decorative type for your faxes. These pretty faces were meant to be used only in small doses, such as in headlines. Difficult to read under the best of circumstances, they're virtually impossible to discern when faxed. If you care about the recipients, you'll spare them the eyestrain. And don't fax text in all caps. When poor transmission blurs letters together, readers need to use the distinctive shapes of upper and lowercase letters as visual cues to tell the characters apart.

The most obvious typeface to choose for your faxes is the same one you use in your letters (assuming you're not using a script, calligraphic, or outline typeface for your letters--also a no-no). With this approach, you maintain consistency across your printed communications. But the typeface that looks great in coffespondence may lose something in the translation when you fax it. One solution is to increase its size and leading (the space between lines).

The Fine Print To tell if your typeface is really suitable for faxing, all you need is a crash course in font lingo and an analysis of those old standbys, Times Roman and Helvetica (or Times New Roman and Arial if you're working in Windows). Although they're extremely versatile, both typefaces have certain design characteristics that significantly limit their suitability as fonts in fax transmissions.

One strike against Times Roman is the relatively small height of its lowercase letters, referred to as the x-height. This plays a major role in determining the apparent size of the type. For example, if you set the same words in the same size (say, 12-point) but use two different typefaces, the one with the larger x-height will appear larger and, in general, will be easier to read. Also, the smaller letters will have smaller counters, the white space enclosed within the rounded forms of such letters as a, b, e, and o. Counters help readers identify characters. When reproduced at small sizes on low-resolution screens and fax machines, small counters can fill in, making the words hard to read. Finally, Times Roman is a delicate typeface, with serifs (the little strokes at the ends of characters) that are relatively thin. When printed or viewed on a low-resolution fax machine or screen, these identifying strokes can easily get lost.

Helvetica has its own problems. Rarely accused of being delicate, Helvetica is a monoweight typeface, which means the horizontal and vertical strokes are basically the same thickness throughout each character. Although this creates characters that are very legible (in other words, identifiable from a distance), Helvetica isn't very readable in long text blocks. The lack of contrast and serifs creates letters that look very similar when faxed.

Top Type Picks If you're ready to venture beyond the basic typefaces that come with Windows or Mac computers, following are my recommendations for alternatives. These are by no means the only ones suitable for faxes, but analyzing them Will give you an idea of what characteristics to look for when you choose your own.

* My number-one choice is Monotype Amassis. Perhaps the premier typeface for faxes, it's darker than Times Roman because the strokes of each of Monotype Amassis's characters are relatively the same thickness, instead of alternating between thick and thin. And the prominent serifs make the letters easier to distinguish than Helvetica's.