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The Internet

What Makes a Good Web Font 515

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-foundery-this-article dept.
SitePoint writes "We've published an article on the way in which fonts are used on the Web. We found that a large "x-height" (the height of a lowercase 'x' in relation to the total height of the font) makes fonts more readable on a computer screen, as does a wide "punch width" (the width of the hole inside letters such as 'o' and 'b'). Helvetica is a good font to use online. The designer's choice of fonts is usually limited by the user's OS, but techniques such as SIFr (example) are allowing Web designers to provide their own fonts."
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What Makes a Good Web Font More

What Makes a Good Web Font

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  • Let the user choose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:02AM (#14255963) Homepage
    Surely the choice of font ought to be something individuals can set up in their web browser. A website doesn't really have much business selecting particular named fonts, content versus presentation and all that. If you use CSS then you can quite reasonably limit yourself to normal, sans-serif and monospaced - and trust that any sane web browser will choose something readable on the user's screen.

    • Re:Let the user choose (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Nowak ( 872479 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:05AM (#14255993)
      Insane... using flash and javascript to render unhighlightable text? Surely usability is more important than typography, no?
      • Ha thats not even the worst part! You can provide your own font face src according to CSS2. Read here [w3.org] for more info. Its absurd using javascript and flash when custom fonts are already handled by CSS.
        Regards,
        Steve
        • which if any browsers actually support downloading fonts?
        • But if those fonts are not available on the users machine, they don't show up. Using the flash method, the fonts are embedded into the flash file.

          As for people thinking that it should be only user-fed font choices, that's just BS. Content is the only reason to go to a site. But if two sites have the same content (think any news site on the planet), I want to go to the site that provides the information in the easiest to digest manner. That requires good design which, for textual content, is hinged on good f

          • Re:Let the user choose (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Onan ( 25162 )
            I agree, design is an important tool to enhance the delivery of content. And you know which font is always the one which best presents your content?

            The one that I, the reader, have chosen.

            Uniqueness is not a virtue in design.

        • It's absurd that you're making this argument when no browser currently supports this method of displaying fonts. You read the recommended spec, not the actual spec. Opera, Firefox and others support the actual spec for CSS2. IE barely supports CSS1, so nobody can use this method yet. It will be a nice day though.

      • Re:Let the user choose (Score:2, Informative)

        by the web ( 696015 )
        The point of highlighted has already been touched on, it can be highlighted.

        But the strength of sIFR is that under the hood, the markup remains <h1>Replaced Text</h1>. Maintaining it's searchability, symantic correctness, and in the event the user doesn't have the appropriate version of flash or has JS turned off, the headline defaults to the style specified in the CSS, Trebuchet, Verdana, what have you.

        sIFR respects the users preferences while at the same time delivering the cherry on top whe
        • The point of highlighted has already been touched on, it can be highlighted.

          Only one flash at a time. Try selecting the WHOLE article and copy it...

      • I've seen worse. (Score:4, Informative)

        by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:06AM (#14256520) Journal
        (putting on my overalls, lighting pipe, sitting in rocking chair in preparation to tell an "old-timers story".)

        Heh! You think that's bad! I remember way back in... must've been '97 or so, there was this company, thought they had a killer solution for fixing incompatibilities in the way browsers rendered sites. They looked at how some things didn't render right in Netscape, and others were cock-eyed in IE, and some things didn't render right in either one, and they had this "brilliant" idea...

        "Screw HTML," they said. "Make your whole site into one big Java app!"

        And that's what they sold to their clients, too: a program that did nothing but generate user interfaces into which you could plug your text and pictures, then stick it on the web. 'Cause after all, everyone had Java, right? So every site should look the same! And if the applet rendered your whole site invisible to search engines, and took ten minutes to load in a client's browser, well, that was a small price to pay to make sure you could get pixel-perfect alignment, wasn't it?

        (I really wish I were joking about this. There really was a product that promised to do exactly what I'm describing here, although I can't remember the name.)
    • Surely the choice of font ought to be something individuals can set up in their web browser. A website doesn't really have much business selecting particular named fonts, content versus presentation and all that.

      Don't you need written permission from the content provider to do that? You know, taking their intellectual property and creating your own derivative work by applying your own formatting preferences to it... Surely web designers should specify exactly how they want their page to appear, and browse

      • Clearly, it is true that Firefox violates the most basic standards by omitting a well-know and widely used tag for making text better. IE integrates it since version 3, and it is rightly so that it is the best *cough* browser as of today.

        MARQUEE implementation should be required before a piece of code should be called a 'browser'.
      • Indeed, the current Web experience is lacking. Web sites should be able to set the screen resolution for the viewer, so that sites optimized for a certain resolution can be displayed optimally on every computer. It's really a shame that there's not yet an API to do it. :-)

    • Re:Let the user choose (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tet ( 2721 )
      Surely the choice of font ought to be something individuals can set up in their web browser.

      Indeed. The article makes some reasonable points, but falls over by using http://www.jaredigital.com [jaredigital.com] and http://www.coudal.com [coudal.com] as sample sites. Both of those make schoolboy errors when it comes to web typography. They override the user's default font, and they specify explicit font sizes in pixels. Which might work fine for them, but not everyone has the same size or resolution display that they do. Font sizes sho

      • Re:Let the user choose (Score:3, Informative)

        by greed ( 112493 )

        Yes, the article completely missed out on the Very Most Important Font Size Issue on the Web.

        That is, of course, how Windows treats points as equivelent to pixels, whereas Macintosh and UNIX system treat points as 72-per-inch like they're supposed to be. (X11 has lots of problems with font rendering if you use the older APIs, but it does know how to read the DDC codes from your monitor to calculate the correct resolution: check xdpyinfo | grep dimensions.)

        (I don't use Windows enough to know--do Mozill

    • Precisely. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Richard Steiner ( 1585 )
      I do a lot of surfing using a text based browser (Links) on an 80x33 screen, and my guess is that most web site designers never anticipated that type of display. It's nice, however, to be able to read everything using the super-readable screen font generated by my video card, and for the most part it seems to work rather well.

      Even with GUI browsers, I tend to override web site fonts with things such as Arial which I know work well on my machine, and which are relatively easy on the eyes.

      If a site author re

    • Well, that depends. (Score:5, Informative)

      by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) * on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:28AM (#14256165) Homepage Journal

      Well first of all, most browsers do have an option to set fonts and override other page's fonts if that's really what you want to do.

      In IE, it's under Tools / Internet Options / Fonts. To make your chosen fonts override fonts set by Web pages, look under Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility, and there's an option labeled, "Ignore font styles specified on Web pages."

      In Firefox, it's under Tools / Options / General / Fonts and Colors. The option to force Firefox to override fonts set by the Web is at the bottom, labeled, "Always use my: Fonts"

      In Opera, well, you're on your own, because I haven't played with it enough to know. I suspect that it's extremely similar, though.

      What you're complaining about seems to be that the Web is increasingly becoming not just about content, but about presentation as well. I know, I know, that's not what it was originally set up for, but it's changed an awful lot over the years. Some sites just don't work right without the ability to say not only what is on a page, but how it's on the page. I'm not talking about not working from a design or coding point of view, I mean from a structural and stylistic point of view.

      As for me, I don't mind. I say, let the site designers present the information to me the way they want to. Yes, sometimes it comes out hideous. Personally, I think whoever picked Bitstream Vera Sans for the ImageMagick [imagemagick.org] home page should be shot. (In the leg; I'm not a capital punishment kind of guy...) If a site looks bad enough, I might avoid it site altogether.

      But most of the time, when site designers dink around with the formatting and style, it doesn't degrade from the look and usability. Sometimes, it turns out really spiffy.

      So unless a site proves that it's not worth looking at, I think giving them the benefit of a doubt and letting them selecting particular named font is perfectly okay.

      Besides, who wants a world in which every frickin' web page looks exactly the same? I kind of like that there are so many different styles of presentation out there in addition to the virtually infinite content!

    • Yes and no: first off, you are assuming this will only get applied to text displayed in browsers. It could just as easily be applied to text in online logo (images) or to text used in PDFs for various purposes.

      Secondly, most users don't even realize they can change the font in their browsers, and a smaller percentage actually do. Asking for a good font will help all of them.

      Thirdly, sometimes part of a design should be in a different font from the rest, to help set it off, or just to help the asthetic. K
    • Not disagreeing with you personally, but for most e-commerce and corporate presence sites this absolutely clashes with the requirements of branding, which does dictate those details, down to the n-th degree.

      Given the money, time and effort expended by most companies to build a visually distinctive brand for products, the branding will usually win out over usability and individual control.

      Not that this provides an excuse for the many, many sites that don't fall into the above two categories, of course...

    • While I generally agree with you that a user should be able to choose the font they want to view a page in I don't agree that a website has no business specifying a font. Presentation, to most people, is an important part of the experience when viewing a web page or any other content. While some people like to view their content devoid of all but the most basic formating (GNU Pages) others (I would argue the majority) like the additional formatting and styling.

      When a designer creates a page (or whole site

    • Please Understand sIFR (Score:5, Informative)

      by SeinJunkie ( 751833 ) <seinjunkie@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:52AM (#14256398) Homepage
      For the uninitiated, please read about sIFR [mikeindustries.com] before making accusations about its supposed limitations. It is scalable and it viewable with Flash and/or CSS disabled. The whole point is that the HTML can stay completely semantic and indexable, but the font can be customized to the needs of the designers. Far too many of the responses here indicate that the /. community has no clue quite how far modern web professionals are going to keep the HTML user-friendly and standards-compliant, while still making their website pleasurable to view on as many browsers as possible (so they get web traffic from people besides, you know, geeks).

      For further reading into the web designer community, poke around sites like the following:

  • Calibri (Score:3, Informative)

    by theheff ( 894014 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:08AM (#14256016)
    I am a huge fan of Calibri. It's a new font that's pretty standard in Office 12. It's similar to trebuchet, but very easy on the eyes. You'll understand once you use it for a little. Only problem is if you're going to use it as text on the web, people need to have it installed, first.
    • Have you tried Optima [myfonts.com]? I find that easiest to read in general; it's also quite stylish (in a subtle way) for a sans-serif font.

    • For those who don't keep up to date with Windows Vista's and Office 12's new general purpose fonts to succeed Trebuchet, Verdana, etc, here's what he's talking about:

      http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683 [poynter.org]

      More characters and better previews here, but in Flash:

      http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/ [poynterextra.org]

      Personally, I agree that these fonts look good and professional (I like Consolas too as the new monospace font, it always annoyed me that Courier / Courier New had tons of "serifs" or whatever you'd cal

    • Re:Calibri (Score:5, Informative)

      by adamjaskie ( 310474 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:48AM (#14256356) Homepage
      This is why you can specify multiple fonts/font families in CSS.

      p {font-family: Calibri, Trebuchet, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

      It will check for Calibri, and use that if the user has it installed. If not, it will check for Trebuchet, then Helvetica, and finally, if the user has none of those installed, it will fall back to whatever the user has set as the default sans-serif font.

      If there is a particular font you like, you can provide it for download (well, if you are ALLOWED to provide it for download, many commercial fonts have to be purchased) on your site, perhaps with a little blurb about how this font is sooooo great you just have to try it. The user can (if she wants) download and install the font, and your site will look the way you intended.

  • "Trust the browser" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 ) <tms&infamous,net> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:09AM (#14256018) Homepage

    The user has selected the font most comfortable for them. Other than for headings and special effects, why not leave it the heck alone? (Especially font size. "Designers" who want to shrink body text from the size I've chosen need to be horsewhipped.)

    • problem is, most people that surf have no clue that:
      • a) they can select a font of their choosing
      • b) how to do it

      so imo, mostly, this argument falls flat. Perhaps more important is the accessibilty of a website? Maybe this is more important:
      http://www.w3.org/WAI/ [w3.org]

    • Re:"Trust the browser" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by julesh ( 229690 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:40AM (#14256830)
      The user has selected the font most comfortable for them.

      Err... no. In 99% of situations, the user hasn't even realised they can change the default font, and wouldn't bother doing so even if they did know because almost every web site they visit overrides the default anyway.

      And most users wouldn't know a readable font if it smacked them over the head with an em-dash. If most people knew about this feature, I bet most people would have it set to comic sans.

  • Italics? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joshv ( 13017 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:09AM (#14256019)
    Well, at least the folks that run slashdot seem to think large italicized blocks of text are readable. I beg to differ.
  • Here's what makes a good web font. The criteria is very simple: The user selected it. Specify monospace or proportional, but use the font the user selected in his browser.

    It sucks having to disable or override fonts globally to keep pages from doing nutty and unreadable things. It breaks the rare case where a specific font was required to make a page work, not simply preferred by the webmaster of the moment.

    • Well, the point of TFA, is deciding what fonts are the most readable. I have to say, I agree with their research for the most part, but I'm confused about large x-height increasing readability.

      I'd also like to add to the list the following traits for font readabilty: line width. Similar to the issue of font size. Other factors being equal, a font with more to see is easier to read then a font with less to read. Font complexity. simple shapes are more readily identified then more complex ones. And col

  • Well, the article is obviously slashdotted, but I don't need to read it to know of a good solution. Browsers come equipped with programming capability (JavaScript) and rendering engines, why not core browser fonts? Come up with a standard set of fonts based on scalability and readability with a range of styles and embed them in the browser to make them OS independent. Keep the number low (say 10) and make sure that additional fonts aren't added to the core set unless absolutely necessary (to avoid the speed

  • What makes a bad font (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:13AM (#14256051) Homepage
    Q: What makes a bad font?
    A: One that requires XHTML + CSS + Javascript + Flash to display.

    Is there some font fetish that I just don't get? Unless I am printing a nifty banner for a 6-year old's birthday, or a logo which should be an image anyway, then it just doesn't matter. As far as I care, there are three fonts: Serif, and Sans-Serif, and Fixed width.

    Technically, this is an interesting hack, but please don't try to it on my computer. I have Flash block in place because Flash is constantly abused like this. Please don't make it worse. If people really really really cared that much about their fonts then we would have a standard mechanism for download fonts, and better font renderers. But frankly, for 99% of the population, the fonts are just fine.
    • As far as I care, there are three fonts: Serif, and Sans-Serif, and Fixed width.

      You've just listed three font categories. These are not fonts, per se. This is akin to saying "As far as I care, there are three HTML tags: Java, CSS, and Flash."
    • Yes, this is an exceptionally inelegant solution to a problem that doesn't even exist. That said, I'm well aware of the "font fetish" you mentioned, suffering a bit from it myself. As a web developer who is a believer in accessibility and standards, I leave it up to the user to decide the font, but as someone who also does design for print, I'm always looking for a "better" or at least more interesting font. I'll peruse font catalogs going ooh and aah, and may even purchase a few, but even in print, 90% of
    • ...But frankly, for 99% of the population, the fonts are just fine.

      I'd wager that close to 99% of the population doesn't even know wtf a font is.

    • First off, you need to distinguish between body and display fonts. Display fonts are the big, complicated, fancy ones, usually for headlines, logos, and very short snatches of text. Text set in display fonts is almost more like a graphic than a piece of text, and they're often rendered precisely that way to give control. In the display text, the font choice has a lot to say about the feel of the site: elegant, chunky, exciting, old-fashioned, etc. They're usually set big enough that additional scaling is
    • A mechanism already exists for using the font that you wish to use in a web site:
      1. Choose a font that you like, and want to use in your web site.
      2. Obtain permission from the font designer to provide the font to your users for download (may be easier said than done, depending on the font).
      3. Provide the font for download, along with a blurb saying something like "There is this great font called X. If you have it installed, you can see this site in its full glory (screenshot link). Download it here (installatio
  • Personally, I like to change my default font to Verdana. I do this on my website, and in my browser. I simply hate Times New Roman, and am not overly fond of Helvetica either. Personally, I see why in logos and things users may want to use other fonts, but since these are typically images, the problem of users not having a font is a moot point. For the rest of websites, though, typically, most decent websites use a standard font such as arial, verdana, helvetica, or Times New Roman.

    While this is extremely c
  • So, Mike, who went to all the trouble to create some crazy Flash-based font downloader, didn't realise that @font-family{src:} has been part of CSS2 (which was made a recommendation 7 years ago) all along?!

    Still, this whole SIFr thing screams of "HACK!" and a quick browse through the comments indicates it's not without flaws. Perhaps web designers should just stop trying to dictate what font you use to view their "works of art" and leave the user in control.

  • Solved problem (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jdavidb ( 449077 )

    The answer is that the web is a medium where you should focus on content and let me and my browser decide how to display it.

  • Giving them choices of more fonts will lead to more web surfing sickness and websites that look like ransom notes.

    It's like a video editing app with hundreds of cheezy transitions.. all they do is make the video look horribly amateurish.

    giving them more fonts and the ability to specifiy and download the font will lead to horrible horrible things.

    Yes some will use it correctly, but others will simply force some wierd fonts upon people that are not very different from a standard font and simply choke up bandw
    • It's like a video editing app with hundreds of cheezy transitions.. all they do is make the video look horribly amateurish.

      What's wrong with "My Island Vacation" using a thick font in bright yellow and orange border with a green shadow effect over top of a scenic tropical (reddish) sunset originally recorded on a VHS-C camera with the sun directly centered in the frame? Add to that the "crumpled paper" or "folded paper airplane" wipe to the first scene and you have a potential Academy Award winning masterpi
  • And for a very good reason. Flash contents are not indexed by Google. Not even when it's text only.
    • The text is apparently included in the HTML file, then Javascript is used to dynamically replace the rendered text blocks with Flash-generated images of the text, rendered w/ anti-alias in the font of the designer's choice.

      I would imagine that Google could still index based on the text in the original HTML file; this hack is more like a layer on top of the text rendering for "improved" visualization.

      As mentioned, once the text is dynamically replaced by images, it no longer becomes user-selectable, which ca

  • Best font = no font requirements (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:23AM (#14256127)
    Web designers should design their pages to accomodate whatever font the user requires. I often use Firefox's Increase and Decrease Font Size features to make text more readable for me, especially if it's latw at night and I'm looking at a web page filled with financial data, etc. Well-designed sites seem to work well with the feature; others that use boundaries, tables, etc. to "force" text into certain areas of the page don't scale well at all. Also, the user should be able to switch between sans serif and serif fonts depending on whether they're scanning for data (sans-serif) or doing long-term reading (serif.)

    Someone should tell the design community that every user can't read every point size or font face well on their computer. This becomes increasingly important now that LCDs have such tiny native resolutions. Large ones can came native at 1400x1050 now, making default font sizes incredibly small for those of us not blessed with perfect vision. For those who don't need magnifying software on their computer but also don't want to run a high-end LCD at a lousy resolution, this is the best idea.
  • From The article: "Modern operating systems such as Windows XP and Mac OS 10 give users the option to display anti-aliased text as standard. This is a good thing, and it makes reading and working on your machine much more comfortable and pleasing to the eye."

    I personally don't like anti-aliasing on "text fonts" for my monitors and I remove the anti-aliasing. This goes for a 19" 1280x1024 CRT-screen and my laptops 15,4" 1920x1200. If the font is less than 20 pixel wide the anti-aliasing make the overall impr

  • The user doesn't KNOW (Score:5, Interesting)

    by notthepainter ( 759494 ) <oblique@alu3.14m.mit.edu minus pi> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:29AM (#14256172) Homepage
    The user often doesn't know that they can change fonts. My wife occasionally does web design for her clients. It isn't her main line of work but sometimes a client wants that as part of the package. Invariably they want pretty fonts. Usually "pretty" is defined as what they personally like. It takes a fair bit of education to convince the client that they should not be specifying fonts, that the viewer should do that. And then it takes a bit of education to show the client how to set the font preference on their browser.

  • Arial is almost Helvetica (Score:3, Interesting)

    by courtarro ( 786894 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:32AM (#14256206) Homepage
    Arial is a nearly perfect substitute for Helvetica as it's mentioned in the summary. While it may seem that these two fonts are significantly different, the bulk of the difference comes from the various architectures' methods of displaying them. You usually see Helvetica on Macs, while PCs live in an Arial world. Don't believe me? Take the quiz!

    http://www.iliveonyourvisits.com/helvetica/ [iliveonyourvisits.com]

    Arial was a Helvetica clone developed by Monospace [ms-studio.com] way back when font cloning was the cool thing to do. Ideally, it sports the same spacing and metrics of Helvetica, making it a literally perfect substitute for Helvetica. Thus, they're both nearly equally readable on the web and in print, and anyone who tells you otherwise is being a prick.

  • 17 n33d$ 70 b3 |337-4b|3 0r 17 \/\/1|| m1$$ 7h3 12-18 d3m09r4ph1c.

    *NOTE: I had to use a Leet Speak generator to write that, I know what it says and I still can't read it.

  • Overall, there was some good information there, but there also were some opinions presented as facts that I really disagreed with. For example, "you want a giant-x-height sans serif font." I know this is trendy, and understand the reasoning behind it, and I still think it's ugly as sin. Paper is free on the web; a font with serifs and decent ascenders and descenders in a large size with lots of leading should be just fine.

    Probably the silliest thing, though, was going on and on about which font to choose

  • If I'd use Flash to display text ... (Score:3)

    by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:34AM (#14256222)
    ... my site wouldn't get indexed properly by my favorite search engine, and NOBODY would read it anymore. So much for the need of readability. The homepage of mr. Knuth [stanford.edu], who cares deeply about fonts, isn't flash-enabled either, as you may have noticed. It simply uses a large font size for readability. Seems a lot more effective to me than using flash.

  • Works for handwriting too! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gidds ( 56397 ) <slashdot@gidd[ ]e.uk ['s.m' in gap]> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:34AM (#14256226) Homepage
    Back at uni, it got to the point where I couldn't read my handwritten notes, so I decided to change my writing. I experimented a lot to see what made it most readable -- and, interestingly enough, I came to pretty much the same conclusions as in this story!

    I found that while long ascenders and descenders (the tails on 'f's and 'g's, and the strokes on 'h's and 'p's) were fun to write and looked stylish, they actually added very little to the legibility, while taking up a lot of space. I also found that making the centre parts of letters bigger did help a lot -- even if it meant leaving smaller gaps between letters (to the point of collision in some cases).

    One other discovery was that printing (writing each letter separately) was practically as fast as writing joined-up, and again, much more readable, especially at speed. (I really don't understand why joined-up writing is seen as more desirable or mature -- it's even a requirement for some school exams -- when it seems to have no practical benefit...)

    Ever since then, my writing has been like that: printed, with large rounded centres to the letters and very minimal ascenders and descenders. I find it's just as fast as before, vastly more readable, and degrades much better when I'm in a hurry. And I still get compliments on my clear and distinctive writing.

  • Fonts do carry information (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:41AM (#14256289)
    I'm suprised that so far the comments have all suggested that website designers have no business specifying fonts for their websites, and that the user's preference should trump all.

    While I like the idea of a user being able to override a web designer's selection, I don't understand the "all fonts are evil!" attitude. Color selection and choice of graphics both can ruin a page, but they also can contribute substantially to the aesthetic and help communicate the mood of the page. Fonts are the same. Even if you think the aesthetic argument is bunk, and that things on the Internet shouldn't be visually appealing, the visual quality of a website does communicate a lot about the effort and seriousness of the designer. Would you buy investment services from a site that used green courier text on a black background and had no graphics? And certainly mood or tone is significant, and carries actually information, difficult to verbalize though it may be.

    Though I'm not a fan of flash and javascript hacks, I do think there need to be better and more widely-implemented methods for font embedding than exist today. I'm glad I can choose better fonts when I find poorly designed sites, but I'll not deny a communicator his or her tools without reason, and see font selection as one of those tools.

    • I don't understand the "all fonts are evil!" attitude. Color selection and choice of graphics both can ruin a page, but they also can contribute substantially to the aesthetic and help communicate the mood of the page. Fonts are the same.

      Yes, fonts are the same. Which indicates that the people who think specifying fonts is bad are exposed to the use of fonts that ruins pages more often than the use of fonts that contributes to the page. I find that easy to believe.

      Really, unless you try quite har

  • Comic Sans MS (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://bancomicsans.com/home.html [bancomicsans.com]

  • Kerning (Score:5, Insightful)

    by art6217 ( 757847 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:46AM (#14256339)

    Kerning [wikipedia.org], that is aligning of individual pairs of letters, is one of the basic concepts in typography. Still, a typical KDE/GNOME/whatever editor/browser is pretty likely to have no kerning at all. It can have translucent background and jumping rubbery icons, and no kerning. This gives that chaotic, uneven look to typical computer typography, and can make the text harder to read.

    Kerning is SO simple to implement in software, and SO effective in improving the text readability, and it is still barely used on computer displays as of now.

    • Re:Kerning (Score:5, Informative)

      by julesh ( 229690 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:31AM (#14256741)
      Kerning, that is aligning of individual pairs of letters, is one of the basic concepts in typography. Still, a typical KDE/GNOME/whatever editor/browser is pretty likely to have no kerning at all.

      Kerning has to be specified in the font you are using in order to work. And doing it well is one of the hardest parts of font design. Perhaps you have badly kerned fonts installed on your system?

      I'm currently running KDE 3.2.1, and can definitely see kerning in my fonts; for instance in K3b, the menu item "Add files..." has the first 'd' pulled slightly left of where it would normally sit. However, I wouldn't say the font it's using (called just "sans serif" in the control centre, so I'm not sure what it is exactly) is great. Although switching on "sub-pixel hinting" in the control centre improves it substantially, there are still problems: "sk", "si" and "sh" seem to be too close together, and "ol" seems to be too far apart, but the big ones ("AV" and the like) all kern correctly.

      It seems to me, therefore, that it just comes down to using badly designed fonts.
  • From reading a lot of comments it seems like a lot of people are afraid of really horrible amateurish looking sites will arrive if people had access to more fonts. Why? Sure, some people will do this. And if you don't like it, don't go to their site. Having access to more fonts is only a good thing. It can allow sites to look unique (note, I'm not saying unreadable. There are a ton of fonts out there that are unique and readable). Magazines have unique looks and use a ton of fonts. Why can't the web

  • Serifs are Important (Score:5, Insightful)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:53AM (#14256415) Journal
    I disagree with the Arial/Helvetica crowd: Serifs make large quantities of text more readable. Sans-serifs such as Arial are readable at a distance, and good for grabbing the eye.

    Still, Times/Times New Roman sucks wet farts out of dead pigeons. It was designed to cram maximal text into a newspaper column, which does not resemble today's web pages, books, etc.

    Fonts such as Bookman, Palatino, Bodoni -- anything with "book" in the title -- are so much more readable as to be stupid not to use. The same benefits of Helvetica are present: large x-height, big holes. You get less text across a single column, but that's a good thing.

    This is probably a job for the W3 folks: select a set of mandatory fonts that every browser must support. There are open-source fonts available that can, like the old Mac fonts and Arial, clone up the classics. We just have to all agree on them to make them compatible.
  • The real issue is the same old fears that we have with music and movies. "Real Designers" with a love of typography and an understanding of users needs for control will attempt to design a readable, accessible page that is "wicked cool and easy to understand / read". The good ones won't care if you want to override those things out of your own preferences (comic sans freaks anyone?) or need (White on Black please! I'm unfortanteley blind as a mole). Go check out the pricing on some fonts from Adobe, Linot

  • Verdana (Score:5, Interesting)

    by behindthewall ( 231520 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:09AM (#14256548)
    One thing that Microsoft -- or the people they hired -- got right.

    Microsoft used to have some web pages for 'Internet/Web fonts'. These included both a collection of TrueType fonts (including Verdana) and some history and other stuff (e.g. a history of Verdana). The pages were up until a year or two ago.

    Then, shortly after I commented to a business analyst (read: specifications author) on the suitability of Verdana, including both the high appeal of the font but also the potential risk of using MS intellectual property and the potential for sharing to cease, I found those MS web pages had been removed. I don't know whether they've since been restored or placed elsewhere.

    Regarding the history and intent, translating into suitability, of Verdana, a quick google turns up:

    http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Verdana.htm [fonts.com]

  • What does this really mean? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:26AM (#14256707)
    Well, let's consider the most common color combination for text and its background: black on white. In a subtractive color system (i.e. print), this is a perfectly suitable practice. The contrast of black on white is as stark and clear as possible, making for good legibility and comfortable reading. However, with an additive color system (i.e. on screen), the color white is produced by mixing red, green, and blue at full intensity. This is why the black on white combination can be overly luminous and too harsh on the eyes to allow extended reading on screen. There is never more light radiating from a screen than when it displays pure white, and this intensity can affect the clarity of fine detail in typefaces and other intricate patterns.

    Pardon me for thinking here. A screen actively generates white at full power and black at 0. Paper reflects white at full power and black at 0. Wtf is the difference? Is this guy full of shit or am I missing something?

    Please don't tell me paper white is not 100% reflection. It doesn't change the basic fact that white is the most reflective and black is the lest reflective just as white is full light and black is 0. Additive, subtractive (I keep wanting to say subtractitive), it makes no difference, white is maximum, black is minimum.
    • While the article is great overall, you're right that this is an odd explanation. I can think of a couple of more logical arguments against black text on a white screen:

      How white is paper? We usually think of the blank paper we feed into a printer as being pure white. But have you ever bought a pack of "bright white" paper and found that it hurts to read black text on it? Most printed material is not white as white can be, so on screen it might be appropriate to put dark grey on white or black on off-

  • Some USER TESTS to back up all those claims maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by janbjurstrom ( 652025 ) <inoneear@noSPAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @11:35AM (#14256772)

    So I scanned TFA in hope of some new research on web typography re: readability. And found nothing but opinion, not even references to research done elsewhere.

    Sure, the author seems to know his typography 101, but how is he backing up his various claims? All I see is "established and time-tested principles of typography" and similar hand-waving.

    This-or-that font is more legible than some other font, because ... "I fall firmly in to the camp that believes that sans-serif faces are a more suitable [readable] option." In the article he even states "It is [low screen resolution], more than any other [factor], that defines the recommendations and principles behind good Web typography."

    So without research/testing (or references to research/testing), how the hell does the author know which font is more readable than the next?

    I'm not saying he's wrong (or that good guesses are worse than no guesses), but he's pointing to various best practices without any research/testing to back up a lot of these claims.

    A quick search [google.com] produced some promising-looking results. Perhaps too much work for a busy web usability professional.

    Second link from the search results: Usability News performed user tests on readability in 2001 (A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When? [wichita.edu] by Michael Bernard, Melissa Mills, Michelle Peterson, & Kelsey Storrer).

    Several observations can be made regarding the examined font types. First, no significant difference in actual legibility between the font types were detected. There were, however, significant differences in reading time, but these differences may not be that meaningful for most online text because these differences were not substantial. It may, on the other hand, be helpful to consider using font types that are perceived as being legible. In this study, the font types that were perceived as being most legible were Courier, Comic, Verdana, Georgia, and Times.
    Their conclusions supports some of his claims, but why should I as a reader have to do his job.. Lazy.

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