Font Geekery

[figmo]

Today a memo came across at KLIV that dictated that "the font we use in the newsroom is 11 or 12 point Ariel." (sic)

Luckily for me, there's no such font as "Ariel" (emphasis on the one letter mine), but....

It's impossible to tell an uppercase "I" from a lowercase "l" in Arial. Take the following sentence:

Ilana Il Ibrahim met Ilano by the llano.

In Times you can read it. Now to show it in Arial:

Ilana Il Ibrahim met Ilano by the llano.

Ludicrous, isn't it? There's only one font that's worse, and that's Helvetica:

Ilana Il Ibrahim met Ilano by the llano.

Let's show it in Courier for comparison:

Ilana Il Ibrahim met Ilano by the llano.

I actually think Courier is best for news copy because, when set at 65 characters per line, it takes around four seconds per line of text to read the copy. You can't do that kind of guestimating with a variable width font.

If you like the Arial "look" but want something readable, a better font is Verdana:

Ilana Il Ibrahim met Ilano by the llano.

I wrote my boss a memo to this effect. IMHO Arial had become the default font for most of the department because it was set up as the default font on all the computers. "Default" does not mean it's the right font to use.

Comments

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I hate justified documents and hyphenation, and love a ragged right edge. I set my E-books to display accordingly. Apparently I'm rare in this preference.

No you're not. Studies have shown text with ragged right margins is easier to read than justified text because the spacing is more natural. As for hyphenation, the same holds true. It's harder to follow a hyphenation from line to line than it is to read unhyphenated text.

Btw, if you want a more readable serif font for printed text (check out the difference between capital "I" and lowercase "l" and the number "1"), I highly recommend New Century Schoolbook or Palatino. Some forms of Garamond are popular that way, too, while others are a pain to read because of the small "x size."

[mdlbear]

One of the reasons I usually go for Times is the large x size and slightly narrower average width: it was specifically designed for cramming the maximum number of characters into a line without loss of readability.

This translates directly into less scrolling.