Font Issues

[shapper]

Hello,

I have been reading a lot about fonts and I got to the following
conclusions:
1.Use % do define font size
2. Avoid defining font in Body and P tags
3. Avoid using Verdana

I understand the reason of point 1.

Point 2 not sure why is that. Why?

Finally, I really like Verdana. Why should I avoid it using? Because
its size gets to small?
And is there a font similar to verdana that I can use?
Is just that I think Verdana is a really easy font to read and looks
good ... under normal conditions.

Thanks,
Miguel

[Bergamot]

Felix Miata wrote:

>
Most people I know who have stated an opinion
on the subject find average web page text too be too small.

That's been my experience, too. And once I teach someone how to adjust
their browser's default size, they invariably make it larger.

--
Berg

[Chris Morris]

Felix Miata <Ug************ ********@dev.nu lwrites:

On 2007/11/21 07:48 (GMT-0500) Stan Brown apparently typed:

if the user sets her own
font size for her own preferred non-Verdana font, and the author
specifies Verdana, it's going to look uncomfortably big to the user.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I've been doing a lot of reading about font sizes the
past couple days, leading me to an even stronger opinion that web
developers/designers are a special class of people who like smaller sizes
than virtually everyone else on this planet.

I don't think it's so much that the designers like reading small fonts
either, as that it makes it much easier to get a nice visual
look. After all, most common (readable body text) fonts are fairly
ugly, so the smaller they're made, the neater the page looks. I don't
think it's the sometimes-suggested opinion about young designers with
good eyesight (I have near-perfect sight and my *minimum* font size
setting is larger than the usual suggestions from websites) - I think
it's because the designers generally don't view the text as text but
as another graphical element, and so whether it's readable or not
doesn't matter anymore than whether you can easily read the text on a
sign in the background of a photograph matters.

You can also fit more text on the screen with smaller fonts, which I
think is an excellent reason to use the default size and so help force
the content writers into being concise.

Anecdotally, when we produced similar versions of a design a few years
ago, one basically straight from the graphics designers' picture and
one modified to remove some of the worst problems (most visibly,
80%->100% font size) the one with the larger font size was described
as 'friendlier' in user testing.

--
Chris

[Rick Brandt]

Felix Miata wrote:

On 2007/11/21 07:48 (GMT-0500) Stan Brown apparently typed:

if the user sets her own
font size for her own preferred non-Verdana font, and the author
specifies Verdana, it's going to look uncomfortably big to the user.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I've been doing a lot of reading about font
sizes the past couple days, leading me to an even stronger opinion
that web developers/designers are a special class of people who like
smaller sizes than virtually everyone else on this planet. [snip]

But look at newspapers, books, magazines, in fact just about any place else you
see printed words intended for individual reading. Typical web fonts are no
smaller than those.

How do the fonts on a web page compare to the fonts in your Windows menus and
toolbars? IMO they should be at least as large as that, but I see no reason for
them to be much larger.

I think there are just a lot of people who need more vision correction than they
will admit to.

[Chris Morris]

"Rick Brandt" <ri*********@ho tmail.comwrites :

Felix Miata wrote:

Maybe yes, maybe no. I've been doing a lot of reading about font
sizes the past couple days, leading me to an even stronger opinion
that web developers/designers are a special class of people who like
smaller sizes than virtually everyone else on this planet. [snip]

But look at newspapers, books, magazines, in fact just about any
place else you see printed words intended for individual reading.
Typical web fonts are no smaller than those.

That rather depends on several factors of the display device, though:
- the physical size of the display (PDA, monitor, projection screen)
- the resolution of the display. Whether web fonts are larger or
smaller than paper fonts depends to a fair extent on whether I set
my display to 800x600 or 1280x1024
- the distance of the viewer from the display screen (for which one
shouldn't necessarily be as close to the screen as to a piece of
paper)
- while it doesn't strictly affect size, it does affect readability:
the quality of the display. Any mainstream display will be
considerably worse-quality than paper (newspaper perhaps excepted),
and while this is improving it's still a long way off.

For a simple test, get a large amount of text in whatever plausible
font size you want to test, and print out half of it (by number of
lines). It will almost certainly be quicker for you to read on paper
than on screen.

If your monitor is exceptionally good, or you yourself are a
statistical anomaly in this respect, then studies show that *in
general* reading speeds are 25% slower on screen.
See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html and many others

How do the fonts on a web page compare to the fonts in your Windows
menus and toolbars? IMO they should be at least as large as that,
but I see no reason for them to be much larger.

Larger on the webpage if it uses my default size, larger in the
toolbars for the majority of sites at their suggested size, as it
happens. I haven't modified the toolbar text size from the default.

Additionally, there's a very good reason that web page text should be
larger than menu text: the menu text is approximately constant. No
matter how hard it is to read, once you've figured it out you don't
need to put that effort in again: you know where it is and what it
does, and if you forget it's only a couple of words to re-read. Often,
you don't even need to read it once. Conversely, unless your browsing
habits consist of reading very short webpages over and over, you spend
most of your browsing time reading relatively large amounts of new
text. It's therefore much more important that it's readable without
effort.

I think there are just a lot of people who need more vision
correction than they will admit to.

Either there's enough that making your site difficult/unreadable to
them makes a significant dent in your profits (or profit-equivalents),
and so you should design to allow for this phenomenon, or there's a
tiny and insignificant amount and the widespread preference for larger
text sizes has another cause.

--
Chris

[Andreas Prilop]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Felix Miata wrote:

The larger group seems to have no problem with "large" sizes.

In German:
"Zu groß" passt!
:-)

Perhaps in English:
"Too big" fits!

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...Alan.J.Flavell

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On 2007-11-21, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
....

Verdana is bad because it does not fit into the "let the user decide the
size" model. When a user decides on the font size, by setting the font
size in his browser, or by not setting it (i.e., defaulting it to
initial settings), he typically does not do this using Verdana but, say,
Times New Roman. When Times New Roman is conveniently readable, Verdana
of the same font size is surely too big.

The same argument applies to Arial and Helvetica, which are much
larger than Times and almost as large as Verdana.
--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell. org>
=============== =============== =============== =============== =======
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Chris F.A. Johnson:

On 2007-11-21, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
...

>Verdana is bad because it does not fit into the "let the user decide
the size" model. When a user decides on the font size, by setting
the font size in his browser, or by not setting it (i.e., defaulting
it to initial settings), he typically does not do this using Verdana
but, say, Times New Roman. When Times New Roman is conveniently
readable, Verdana of the same font size is surely too big.

The same argument applies to Arial and Helvetica, which are much
larger than Times and almost as large as Verdana.

Not really.

Times New Roman (which is probably what you mean) has relative x-height
value(i.e., x-height divided by font size) of 0.448, Arial has 0.519 and
Helvetica almost the same (0.523), whereas Verdana has 0.545. Of
course, there's some variation depending on implementation of font and
method used to estimate its x-height.

The visible differences are bigger, since the impression is also
affected by stroke width, aperture, and other properties of the font.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Felix Miata]

On 2007/11/21 13:59 (GMT) Chris Morris apparently typed:

I don't think it's so much that the designers like reading small fonts
either, as that it makes it much easier to get a nice visual

"nice" as beholden by their own eyes.

look. After all, most common (readable body text) fonts are fairly ugly,

Actually when resolution is as high as it can be nowadays they needn't be
"ugly" at all. "12pt" @ 120 DPI (~200px per character box - 1680x1050 on
16"-17" laptop) is seemingly near infinitely less ugly than "12pt" @ 80 DPI
(~89px per character box - 1024x768 on '17"' CRT).

so the smaller they're made, the neater the page looks...I think
it's because the designers generally don't view the text as text but
as another graphical element, and so whether it's readable or not
doesn't matter anymore than whether you can easily read the text on a
sign in the background of a photograph matters.

Exactly. They're generally incapable of using/reading their work product as
an ordinary user would.
--
" A patriot without religion . . . is as great a
paradox, as an honest man without the fear of God."
John Adams

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/

[dorayme]

In article <3X************ *******@newssvr 12.news.prodigy .net>,
"Rick Brandt" <ri*********@ho tmail.comwrote:

How do the fonts on a web page compare to the fonts in your Windows menus and
toolbars? IMO they should be at least as large as that, but I see no reason
for
them to be much larger.

One does not sit there reading menu items.

--
dorayme

[VK]

On Nov 21, 9:55 pm, "Jukka K. Korpela" <[e-mail] t.fiwrote:

Times New Roman (which is probably what you mean) has relative x-height
value(i.e., x-height divided by font size) of 0.448, Arial has 0.519 and
Helvetica almost the same (0.523), whereas Verdana has 0.545. Of
course, there's some variation depending on implementation of font and
method used to estimate its x-height.

The visible differences are bigger, since the impression is also
affected by stroke width, aperture, and other properties of the font.

Each Web author gives you an *image of the whole page*, not a
particular font-size for Verdana, Times New Roman etc. Think of a
vector graphics image: if it is too small for you, then make it all
bigger; if it is to big then make it all smaller. So the user chooses
the magnification/diminution coefficient for the whole page, not for
its particular parts. The default fonts and the default fonts
coefficients supplied with the browser installation is the product of
long usability analysis and very hot discussions. No one can give you
a set that will be the best suited for 100% of situations: the task is
to give you MaxSituation coverage. That means that as being as an end
user one must never change any of these settings unless it is a fixed
known set of sites one planning to visit. Otherwise one be in the
position of a user of some imaginary vector graphics viewer where one
can set independently different "one step coefficient" for say
straight lines and Besier curves, so say on Ctrl+ straight lines
getting x1.2 bigger, L-Bezier x1.3 bigger and Q-Besier x1.4 bigger. It
is evident that with some minimum efforts the majority of available
vector images will be in FUBAR state in this given viewer. So again
and INHO the reasoning of the kind "what if I want to set Arial/
Verdana as default with such exact size" is another reflection of the
webpunk thinking, thus the strong idea that the whole world has to
turn around beloved myself, and if it's refusing to turn in such way
then I have all my holly rights to f*ck the world and to f*ck anyone
preventing the world to turn around beloved myself.

Ctrl + gets everything one step bigger
Ctrl - gets everything one step smaller
Enjoy, everyone, what an fn problem?

From the further usability point of view browser producers are way
late to provide the most evident feature: a possibility to have the
view coefficient as a browser setting. So each page could be open as
if one pressed say Ctrl + twice or Ctrl - twice.