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

[poltr1]

At least Arial and Helvetica denote a difference between the lowercase "l" and the numeral "1". With Times and Courier fonts, there's very little (if any) distinction between the characters.

Of course, the good part about that is that I used to get very little spam in my email box, since my email address had both characters. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

I'm just waiting for a DJ at KLIV to play some somgs from the 1940's and introduce them as songs from World War Eye Eye. Maybe then the policy will get changed pronto.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

KLIV used to play songs from the 1940s before it went all-news in 1991.

Given the fonts, though, I'd expect someone to refer to "World War Ill."