Experimenting with the Vera fonts

[SimPLsol at aol.com]

I have been using the Bitstream Vera typeface since it was discussed on the 
list and I like it a lot.
It is not as clean and well-balanced in small sizes as Geneva but it works, 
and at larger sizes it looks as good as Lucinda Grande and better than Arial. 
The dots in the middle of the zeros (to distinguish them from Os, "oh"s) do 
take some getting used to.
Vera comes in serif, San-serif, and proportional fonts that look good 
together. For calendars and number lists where you may have used Courier you can 
substitute Vera Sans-serif Mono and it will look good next to text in Vera 
Sans-serif Proportional (in my experiments Vera Mono replaced Courier exactly - with 
the same width and leading - and it looks much better). One could also use 
Vera Sans-serif for buttons and label text while balancing it with Vera Serif for 
user text entries. Lots of good possibilities.
Bitstream's licensing is also good, basically you can use the typeface in 
commercial products but not sell it on its own - very reasonable.
Paul Looney