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trebuchet

Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 12:03 am
by Bailey
treb·u·chet (trby-sht) also treb·uc·ket (--kt)
n.
A medieval catapult for hurling heavy stones.



[Middle English, from Old French, from trebucher, to overthrow : tre-, over (from Latin trns-; see trans-) + but, trunk of the body (of Germanic origin).]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Image

mark an-Atlatl-on a-huge-scale Bailey

TREBUCHET

Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 5:52 am
by Jeff hook
The "Trebuchet" name's been used for a clear, sharp-edged, sans-serif, True-Type personal computer font.

Wikipedia says the name was taken from the medieval siege engine but I wonder about Wikipedia's explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet_MS


...Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval siege engine. The name is a response from the puzzle question Vincent Connare heard from within Microsoft headquarters. The question was "can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically is it possible and how?"...
I don't see the connection. I'd like to check further into the use of the "trebuchet" name for this font.

Wikipedia provided a link to this Microsoft Typography page:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fon ... uchet%20MS


About the font

The Trebuchet typeface family, like Verdana and Georgia, was created for use on the screen. Designed and engineered in 1996 by Microsoft’s Vincent Connare, it has a strong and unmistakable appearance. Borrowing elements from both the geometric and humanist classifications of sans serif type - Connare acknowledges the influence of designs as diverse as Gill Sans, Erbar, Frutiger, Akzidenz Grotesk and the US Highway signing system - Trebuchet infuses any page with energy and personality. Its letterforms, loosely based on sans serif typeface designs of the 1920s and 1930s, carry a large x-height and clean lines designed to promote legibility, even at small sizes...

...One of Connare's intentions when designing Trebuchet was to instill personality into the letterforms, even at small sizes, while retaining clarity and readability. He wanted to create a typeface which was 'significantly distinguishable from Verdana and MS Sans...



I think Connare succeeeded admirably with this font. I'm interested to see that he also designed Comic Sans MS.

Hmmm... this may serve to augment Wikipedia's mysterious correlation of the name of this font with the idea of hurling somebody across the Microsoft corporate campus in a medieval siege engine:

http://www.ascendercorp.com/msfonts/tre ... amily.html


...The typeface name is credited to a puzzle heard at Microsoft, where the question was asked, "could you build a Trebuchet (a form of medieval catapult) to launch a person from the main campus to the consumer campus, and how?" The Trebuchet fonts are intended to be the vehicle that fires your messages across the Internet. "Launch your message with a Trebuchet page"...

I like the look of this font when it's used for the annotation of either vector or raster digital images. Its on-screen clarity seems to be an asset for image headings and captions.

Jeff Hook

Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 7:39 pm
by Bailey
Gee, Jeff you work too hard you'll burn out if you go at it this hard.... :lol: 'sides you're making us look bad, That said, I am gad at least someone is posting in here.

mb

TREBUCHET

Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 7:52 pm
by Jeff hook
Nah, this ain't "work," it's just fun! My comments in this thread were composed right here on the screen. I "did my research" in my browser, limited as it was, and I just pasted portions of it to this thread, so this was a "one-step" contribution. (I'd usually create a local "research" file and I'd usually compose my thread comments there, to gain the benefit of spell-checking, etc. In this case I just "slapped it all down" onto the screen here, as I found it in the browser, with no great investment of time.)

Believe it or not, I'm going out right now to try to cut the grass at 7:50 PM EDST, so I'll not be posting any more comments in the immediate future!

(Trebuchet: What a great font. I've only begun to use it in my many annotated images recently, and I love it, so the word definitely caught my eye.)

Jeff Hook

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 8:25 pm
by Perry
Gee, Jeff you work too hard you'll burn out if you go at it this hard.... :lol: 'sides you're making us look bad, That said, I am gad at least someone is posting in here.

mb
Excuse my absence old thing. We obught our first house recently, and moving day was Tuesday. We've been in busy beaver mode for the last month.

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 10:23 pm
by sluggo
I like this font, often use it in e-mail signatures. Enriching to learn the background, though I never expected to see the word humanist applied to a font.

The word has an uncanny resemblance to a very good singer in New Orleans, Troi Bechet.

Perry- congratulations! :)

TREBUCHET

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 10:35 pm
by Jeff hook
I'm enjoying the Troi Bechet MySpace audio clips.

Sluggo: You da NOLA man to suggest "Creole" in the Goodword Suggestion forum. I searched the site and didn't find any evidence that our good doctor had enlightened us about this important word.

Jeff Hook

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 10:52 pm
by Jeff hook

I never expected to see the word humanist applied to a font.
I always had far too many fonts "on deck" (>600, I think, before I moved most of them out of the active folder) so I was well aware of the existence of a large "Humanist Font Family." I often saw the name while I scrolled up and down the mile-long font list in my word processor.

I think most of them are German, Austrian, and Swiss, but I haven't even checked my own Google response set.

Here it is:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hu ... gle+Search

Jeff Hook

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:12 pm
by Bailey
I like lots of fonts available too but haven't used trebuchet, I like comic sans.

mark old-thing-[snort] Bailey

TREBUCHET

Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:37 pm
by Jeff hook
How's this for a font-related site? Seems pretty rootin'-tootin' good to me:

http://ilovetypography.com/

Jeff Hook