71–80 of 146 posts
Times Roman is just another example of the defaults becoming the standard and we've all been trained to know the defaults serve hardly anyone yet we keep hammering away at them relentlessly as if they'll give us anything but default outcomes
He lists only three 'flaws' with Times New Roman. The first is: > It was created for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts yet all the alternatives are almost exactly the same width. Plantin is even a bit narrower. How do they "avoid its shortcomings"? The second flaw is "italic is mediocre", which I'm not in a position to judge. The third (and main) complaint is "it connotes apathy", and one of th…
The site started years ago purely as an "educate yourself about fonts and stop using the fucking defaults!" site.
I think there's a chance that if a document is set in Times New Roman, the author focussed on the content rather than the presentation, which usually is a good thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: scratch this, forgot about the ‘HN Enhancement’ extension. I see Helvetica Neue with fallback to Arial, and I checked that it's not my CSS. Verdana is pretty crappy for texts of even a comment length, as it's wide as heck. I have to hack it out with CSS on sites that I use regularly, or the eye gets tired in minutes.
Wide is good, it improves readability. If you want a narrower version of the same font, try Tahoma. As a more readable version of Times New Roman, I like Georgia. It too was commissioned by Microsoft as a web font.
And I don't need to choose between the hyper-tight Helvetica and a bunch of MS fonts from the 90s, because thankfully the world is not limited to them.
I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…
I love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - https…
I wonder if Times New Roman would look better on an extremely high resolution screen, or if there's something else that would have to change in how we produce screens. (Increased contrast, or the lack of a backlight, for example.)
Firefox on Android refuses to use the fonts I have designated in about:config, so HN remains depressingly sans.
The best three fonts are: "sans-serif" (for general use), "monospace" (for code), and "serif" (for when you need a secondary font for contrast). The choice of implementation for these fonts should be left to the reader (who will probably use the defaults for their browser/ebook reader). This way everybody gets the fonts they're used to, which are the easiest fonts to read. I don't even know which exact font I'm looki…
I would be interested in reading more about how you prevent web designers from changing the page's font. I used about:config on Firefox to stop fonts from downloading, but that made it hard for me to use github.com and one or 2 other sites because those sites use a font to render icons that are essential parts of the UI.
In a related vein, I’m curious to HN’s preferences. For electronic reading, do you prefer serif or sans-serif fonts?