Hello, it's me.

[Merlin Corwinson]

Per the rules, I introduce myself.

Our child is interested in the spell-systems for role-playing games (RPGs among friends) and fantasy novels.

Fantasy novels, I have read for decades.

1. The late Roger Zelazny used to get head-aches whenever he tried magic (Immer, Zlaz [below]); perhaps such headaches could have been caused by his terminal cancer, before it was diagnosed?
2. I got headaches trying to read Jack Vance, whose magical system influenced Zelazny & Gary Gygax (Dungeons & Dragons), because my vocabulary had atrophied.
3. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy rekindled my interest in shamanism, from Finland to North America: Are sweat-lodges & saunas (or scalping) vestiges of a common culture before humans crossed the Berling Straits?

A few years ago, I learned that a leather-jacket wearing friend of mine is an occult public intellectual.

Decades earlier, I was tickled pink that the philosophical logician & voting-theorist Michael A. E. Dummett wrote c. 4+ books on the game of tarot. (Also, why didn't his parents just give him the initial Æ, like that kid from Pokémon?)

Speaking of letters, I am very interested in the development of runic scripts, specifically the Elder Futhark runes from Lepontic, Roman letters, or epichoric Greek, etc. I am thrilled to be able to look at Erik Moltke's out-of-print monograph, Runes and their origins: In Denmark and Elsewhere.

Of course, I agree to follow the house rules and guidelines.

Thanks for your good will!

P.S. I prefer to read text in serif typefaces, such as Georgia [Pro] or Book Antiqua, which I match with Veranda (a sans-serif typeface) from Matthew Carter (like Georgia). For legibility, I am prone to increase the point-size to at least 14-16 points and have a maximum of 65 characters per line. If my typography irritates anybody with better eyesight, I apologize in advance.

• Immer, Zlaz: The Zelazny Yoke Letters, Portrait of a Lifelong Friendship. (Floyd, Virginia: Positronic Publishing, 2022) with Carl B. Yoke

 

[Yazata]

Hi, it's me.

I am prone to increase the point-size to at least 14-16 points and have a maximum of 65 characters per line. If my typography irritates anybody with better eyesight, I apologize in advance.

But everybody else's writing on here is in normal size so you'd be better off by just zooming in when you read here and type like the rest. See for example this thread and the discussion:

No more colored texts

Yeah, why would you ever want to do this? Look, i think we've all wanted to go out into the woods and tame a pack of wolves to do our bidding but it's hard enough trying to tame even one, why on earth would you ever think that trying to tame a whole pack - while being mentally fragile, mind you...

wizardforums.com

 

[hollowglasd]

Welcome

 

[Merlin Corwinson]

Typographical guidelines appear in the website

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by Matthew Butterick.

My 26 px exceeds the 25 px maximum suggested by Butterick by 1 px, the better to satisfy typegraphical guidelines on characters per line (45-60 on computer screens). In contrast, the default setting has roughly 140 characters per line (wow!) and 15 px (the minimum suggested by Butterick).

Your well intentioned suggestion to zoom-in is what I first thought, too. Alas, optimum sizes are determined by eye-physiology and optics (especially related to distance from eye to text): Roughly, the viewing-angle is more important than size: Sizes above the threshold do not help (but see also Aldous Huxley's art-criticism). Butterick may have references.

Serif typefaces are better for running text, while sans-serif UI typefaces are great for labels and for text smaller than 8 points (according to Charles Bigelow, co-designer of the Lucida family, who has uploaded relevant papers to ResearchGate; ResearchGate also has a paper by Matthew Carter on the design of Sitka).

(White typefaces on dark backgrounds raise additional concerns, discussed by Butterick and by Erik Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep and find out how type works. I believe that typefaces need to be thinner when back-lit or when white on black. Here, imho, with the black background, Georgia seems to suffer from gout.)

Another useful book is The Elements of Typographical Style by Robert Bringhurst.