No doubt, the best type will always be rendered in compiled and fine-tuned in InDesign/Quark because of the increased control.

Regarding your review of DTL, great job! I’ll add my comments here:

Argo – nice, yet kind of hard to compare to Adobe Ocean since the latter is a bit more condensed

Caspari – Way cool. No sense of humanism at all. I perceive a little Greek flavor on the capital “K”. The diameter of the bowl on the lowercase “g” looks a bit small.

Documenta – The sagging upper lip on “3″ is quite ugly.

Dorian – lowercase “y” is stylish. Capital “Y” is strange indeed. “W” seems somewhat distorted.

Fleischmann – Seems like a mix of Modern (contrasted) and Old Style. The big thorny serifs at times are a bit much when sitting next to the flatter serifs on other capital letters.

Nobel – Those edges are indeed very sharp. I like Futura a LOT better.

Prokyon – Seems kind of Greek. That lowercase “g” gets annoying to read. This type would probably look good on a bag of frozen Falafel.

Romulus – Elegant. I like Hoefler Text, although that is quite an expensive font family.

Unico – Numerals are stylish

Albertina – When I enlarge the PDF, some lowercase letters overpower their neighbor in size. Look at the “x” in “example” between the “e” and “a”.

Caspari – Definitely superior for being a bit more compact. Exhibits some of the properties of Gill.

Thanks for stopping by again and sharing your input. It means a lot to have some intelligent conversation for my readers and I. I’m a typophile but by no means well-versed in the field (still learning).

Adobe’s fonts are great workhoses. Recently I did a small review of the Dutch Type Library, but even it seems to be unable to match Adobe for quality. Well, that’s my opinion, at least.

I agree that these fonts are nothing spectacular in comparison to many of the great premium fonts out there, classic and new. Some of my favorites in the major styles -

Sans-serifs:
Gill Sans, Futura, Neue Helvetica, and Rotis Sans

Serifs:
Palatino, any flavor of Garamond , Clearface, and Walbaum

Slab-Serifs:
Clarendon, Cholla Slab, and Corporate E

However, since most of these fonts can only be purchased…or some may come with a new system (like Futura or Garamond); it’s probably nice to promote some of the free ones out there for people writing documents in MS Office. That environment is where I see these fonts being used the most.

I really like Calibri – it has replaced Arial as the standard/initial font in Word 07. I’ll likely hardly ever use these fonts for any graphics though as I have my own set of favorites.