The first set of fonts that I are being compared are Courier New, Georgia, and Times New Roman. The first thing that I noticed when I looked at them is that Courier New takes up the most space, followed by Georgia, and lastly ending with Time New Roman. Courier New is a monospace typeface, so naturally it will take up more space. The line height in Georgia seems to be the largest, with Courier New and Times New Roman being about the same. Some of the numbers of Georgia have descenders, while the other two do not. The contrast between ascenders and descenders appear most evident in Times New Roman, followed by Georgia, and ending with Courier New. Georgia and Times New Roman actually look fairly similar in terms of their serifs and the shape of their strokes, except Georgia has much larger counters, and a larger x-height. Even the variance in their stroke weights are fairly similar, with the exception of a couple letters, such as "t" where the terminals do not cut off the same. The aperture in Courier New appears to be bigger than the other two. The numbers in Georgia seem to flow with the text better than the other two and does not draw too much attention to themselves.
The second set of fonts that are compared are Arial, Verdana, and Impact. One of the first things I noticed was that Verdana has a cross-strokes at the top and bottom of its "I"s whereas Arial and Impact do not. Impact is certainly the most condensed of the three fonts, and also least readable. At such a small scale, the counters and eyes start to become unclear, where as Arial and Verdana still remain legible and readable. The ascenders and descenders in Impact are also very short. The x-heights in Arial and Verdana are similar. Verdana still takes up the most space, despite having a similar line-height to Arial. The shoulders on some of the letters and Arial also seem to wrap around the letters and numbers more than Verdana, such as with the number "9" or "6". The comma in Arial is also more curved than in Verdana. The spines on the three of them are also quite different. The aperture at the bottom of the "S" in Arial appears to be bigger than the one at the top, whereas the space seems to be even in both halfs for Verdana. Impact has quite a lot of contrast between its stroke widths.
For the third set, I compared Helvetica, Trebuchet MS, and Garamond. The first thing that stood out to me is how much bolder and heavier Trebuchet seems to naturally be than Helvetica or Garamond. Helvetica and Trebuchet MS both appear more geometric than Garamond. Similarly to the relationship between Arial and Verdana, Helvetica also has more of a shoulder than Trebuchet MS. The two of them take up a similar about of space, sharing similar x-heights and line-heights. The weight of the strokes appear to make up the bulk of their differences in terms of size. The eye is most visible in Helvetica, because the line-height in Garamond is so small. Of course, Garamond is also the only font of all three to have serifs. The lowercase g's are different between Helvetica and Trebuchet MS, with Helvetica not having a loop as a descender. Garamond does have a loop as its descender. Garamond also seems to have the most contrast in its stroke widths making it very legible despite its smaller x-height. The cross-stroke in the "T" in Trebuchet MS and Garamond appear to be similarly spaced in comparison with Helvetica, whose cross-stroke appears lower down on the stem. The x-height in Helvetica actually appears slightly larger than Trebuchet MS, but the amount of space that they take up are almost equal because of the bold strokes of the latter font. The quotation mark in Helvetica appears more pronounced than Trebuchet MS, and is fairly similar to Garamond's. Garamond's seems to demand more attention when looking at it in comparison to the rest of its text.
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