Information on "Fractional Character Widths" and "City-named" Fonts

Geneva, along with other "city-named" fonts (New York, Monaco, Athens, San Francisco, etc.) are low-resolution fonts. They are optimized to look best when printed and/or viewed at 72 dots per inch (i.e., on a screen, or when printed to a low-resolution printer like an ImageWriter).

Non city-named fonts are usually high-resolution fonts, which don't look as good on screen, but they look good when printed to a high-resolution printer, such as a laser printer or an inkjet printer. There are "pairs" of low- and high-resolution fonts: New York is the low-resolution version of Times; Geneva is the low-resolution version of Helvetica; and Monaco is the low-resolution version of Courier. "Fractional Character Widths" is a setting which should be used when printing high-resolution fonts to a high-resolution printer. If this setting is off, then the Macintosh will assume that you are printing to a low-resolution printer, and it will space characters more broadly. This is fine for low-resolution fonts, like Geneva, as it spaces them out more appropriately, especially for on screen viewing or when printing to a low-resolution printer. But leaving Fractional Character Widths off will cause high-resolution fonts to have gaps if printed to a high-resolution printer.

Turning Fractional Character Widths on tells the Macintosh to space characters more finely when printed. This makes low-resolution fonts look bad, because they're not designed to be spaced this closely, but it vastly improves the look of high-resolution fonts when printed to a high-resolution printer.

Generally, if you're designing something to be displayed on screen, or for a low-resolution printer, it's best to choose low-resolution, or "city-named" fonts, and leave Fractional Character Widths off. But if you're printing to a laser or inkjet printer, and an occasional compressed character on screen doesn't bother you, then you should use high-resolution fonts and have Fractional Character Widths on. That's the setting most people should and do use. Note that none of this has anything to do with whether or not the font you're using is a TrueType or a bitmap font. TrueType fonts scale to any size very nicely. Geneva, New York or Monaco are not going to be spaced (kerned) as well as a high-resolution font when printed to a high-resolution printer.