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

Give Me Serifed Body Any Day

[(Anonymous)]

Studies have repeatedly shown that serif fonts are easier to read for body text than are sans serif -- in print. Since you're talking about print (and most of my work is designed for it), I agree with you that Arial is a poor choice of font. Something like Zapf Calligraphic or Zapf Elliptical is my choice (nice large letters - I am not fond of the narrow type found in some Garamonds, for example). So, naturally, Arial is the REQUIRED font at work. Of course, at my previous workplace it was Lucida Sans, which is only marginally better. For onscreen, though, sans serif is a better choice and will continue to be until screen resolution improves to >150 dpi. (The 220 dpi screens in test now intrigue me. Remind me to win the lottery.) Even on sharp screens, little serifs bother the eyes at low res. Good luck getting the management to change things. Maybe print two copies of everything -- one for show, one for use? - B -