Text for Proofing Fonts: A Farewell to the Quick Brown Fox
Very interesting article, but set up against a strange straw man.First, the usefulness of a full page of text for critically analyzing a font is obviously extremely useful for type designers looking for flaws to fix, or perhaps a national newspaper or magazine selecting a new body type that must be absolutely flawless. This is indeed a great text for proofing fonts.But "quick brown fox" was never intended for proofing fonts. When the author says pangrams are "singularly useless" for that, he's right, but they're very good for something else.Mainly, browsing fonts in a catalog to get the full personality at a single glance, on a single line. Above all what kind of "a", "e", "f", "g", "j", "l", "t", and "w" it has, since these (in non-italic) generally have the most variation. To check if there are any letters the font does something "weird" with. And just get an overall basic sense of look and spacing.So setting the paragraphs he comes up with, as a replacement for pangrams, just feels like the entirely wrong way to frame it.(All that said, I have insane respect for the man -- his designs set the absolute top bar.)