Comments on: The Sans of Time

By: Kanaloa, the Squid God

Kanaloa, the Squid God — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 07:19:46 +0000

You feeble humans dare to demand font changes??? You with your reversed retinas and your foveal blind spots! Kanaloa says, Get yourself some mollusc eyes! What is that I hear you say? Your genetic engineering does not allow that? And you call yourselves creators? Kanaloa who made all the creatures of the sea, Kanaloa whose breaths are the tides, laughs at your weakness. Until your pathetic technology allows you to see with our superior vision, Kanaloa will show mercy. There will be changes. The Squid God has spoken!

By: Robert Hood

Robert Hood — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:55:53 +0000

I agree about the size of the comment font — very tiny and obscure. It’s hard to tell if you’re typing English or some Russian dialect. Mind you, it’s clearer here on my iBook at home than it is on my G5 at work! (Or has the God Squid read David’s comment and upped the size ever so slightly?)

By: David

David — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 04:10:00 +0000

First, Yikes – worsto f all is the incredibly minute and illegible font that I seem to have to use to type this comment. Not sure if its a browser issue or what, but it sure is annoying.

Personally, I think the ‘designed for screen’ issue is at least as important when choosing a screen font as serifs. Georgia or a similar designed for screen serif font is preferred, but I’d rather a sans that works well on screen than a serif that doesn’t. And the converse applies, too – a lot of fonts that work well on screen seem a bit clumsy and clunky when printed. It must be possible to make fonts that work well both ways (there are all sorts of magic hidden in modern font formats to support slightly different renderings for screen/print) but few people seem to have bothered. Many good screen fonts look just awful in print – the worst font crime of all being printed work that uses the venerable mac system font Chicago and its relatives, but thankfully that is less common these days.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:29:38 +0000

And, Rob, let me congratulate you on a top notch headline…

Good stuff.

By: Chris Lawson

Chris Lawson — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:15:26 +0000

Wonderful article, Rob. If we were to move over to a serif font, I prefer the look of Georgia. The problem according to the Ralph Wilson article you linked is that Georgia is not widely installed. Around 15% of users could not distinguish between Georgia and Times New Roman, which means they didn’t have Georgia on their system so their browsers defaulted to Times New Roman — a font that looks impressive on paper but looks plug ugly on screen. That was in 2001. And it hasn’t got any better since then.

According to CodeStyle’s font prevalence survey, as of 5 March 2006, only 91% of Mac users and 84% of Windows users have Georgia installed. This makes me reluctant to move over to a serif font. On the other hand, it means 85-90% of all users will get their layout in Georgia and 10-15% will get it in Times New Roman or whatever is set for their default serif font, and I guess that’s not too bad.

By: Peter Hollo

Peter Hollo — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:14:32 +0000

Of course, sometimes you want a format that will put your readers in a bad mood right from the start...