On my 15" G4 Powerbook, editing a Word document in Times 12 requires zooming to 150% to make it legible to my demi-century plus eyes (with my cheaters – without them nothing less than 30 point is any good). Times is a nice font for printing and 12 points is a good size to print in. But zooming up causes the spacing between words on the screen to be truly screwed up, rendering the manuever useless after all. I was befuddled until I started playing with fonts at random and found that Verdana 12 has a reasonable size on screen, so I've switched to it.
Why are most of the fonts, like Times, too small to read at normal point size? Does it have anything to do with the increased number of dots per inch on modern screens? Was Verdana designed to overcome this problem? Oughtn't there be a real fix?
Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at October 10, 2003 12:57 PMWe actually discussed this in my MLS class on Information Design.
And, yes, that's exactly the problem with Times.
The fonts Verdana and Georgia were specifically designed (a) to be easily legible on computer screens and (b) as free fonts available for any operating system, for more uniformity on the Web.
Hope you don't mind the lecture (though Googling turns up more detailed info on their development); not only do I find Verdana & Georgia easier to read, I think they're more aesthetically pleasing than Arial & Times.
Posted by: Lis at October 10, 2003 01:50 PM
Times is modeled after the London Times' typeface. The original hot lead version was designed to be readable with a maximum number of characters per linear inch.
But it certainly does suck to try to read onscreen. It's our corporate standard... because it's in the printer, and at least it's better looking than Courier (bleah!).
Actually, Courier is my pet peeve font: it's hideous at every size. The strokes are so thin, it's unreadable, yet it's about the only monospaced font available on PostScript printers, and tons of computer systems still put out fixed-width text.
Just try talking a large corporation into licensing fonts for all their printers AND that a bunch o' systems need to be retrofitted to use it.
So hundreds of pages of systems output gets tacked onto clinical reports, and you can't make any use of it like that. Now, we need to get FDA to accept data in XML... but that's a whole nuther challenge.
Posted by: joelfinkle at October 10, 2003 05:11 PM
try HELVETICA
the grandfather of all readable font types)
Verdana is derivate of Helvetica.
Helvetica stays visually almost the same in different point sizes
Posted by: zyclop at October 10, 2003 06:28 PM
Some of this is Word's horrible text layout engine interacting poorly with everything else. There may be a "fractional widths" setting you can tweak (turn either on or off) that will fix the layout issue with zoomed Times.
The other thing you might want to try to do is adjust your text antialiasing ("font smoothing") settings in the General pane of your System Preferences. I have mine on "Medium - best for flat panel" and it works rather nicely on both my old PowerBook G4's screen (1152x768 LCD, not the new one) and on an external 19-inch Sony Trinitron run at 1600x1200.
Granted, my eyes are a little younger than yours, but smudgy versus sharp antialiasing probably has just as much to do with it.
I can't wait for the day in the near future when we can get 24-inch 200dpi displays and operating systems will actually treat them as 200dpi... (Getting the 200dpi display is already possible, from IBM or ViewSonic. And the Quartz imaging architecture makes supporting such displays properly in Mac OS X very simple for Apple.)
Posted by: Chris Hanson at October 10, 2003 08:13 PM
Verdana is a great face, especially for readability, and works well across platforms (Windows and Mac, at least) because, as a commenter noted, Microsoft gave them away for free.
For Mac OS X-only work, Lucida Grande is also exceptionally readable, and I think more pleasing than Verdana. Only problem is that, if you exchange docs with Windows users, the fonts will revert to something else.
Hmmm, maybe Apple could give away a few of their unique faces, to facilitate their use on other platforms...
Posted by: Alderete at October 10, 2003 09:23 PM
I used to have the same problem. I think it is because MS Word is a Carbon application and does not render the fonts as well as a Cocoa app would. I installed Silk (http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/silk/), which solved the problem.
Posted by: Eddy Young at October 11, 2003 01:28 AM
As far as monospace fonts are concerned, I tend to be partial to Lucida Console on Windows machines.
Posted by: Lis at October 11, 2003 08:22 AM
I too have had this problem and discovered the following. In the Zoom selector in icon bar, you can select Screen Width. This "enlarges" the page to the size of your Word Window. Pretty nice, fonts scale up, use anythign you want. I typically love fonts that look HORRIBLE on screen, this fixes my problems...
Posted by: Rick Wintheiser at October 11, 2003 09:53 AM
I find it a real pain that word processors require you to edit on screen using the same font as you want to print with. One of my favourite print fonts is Garamond, but it's unbearable on screen. Back when I used to use Word I would set the font to Georgia while I was editing, then switch it to Garamond just before printing.
But I've since solved this problem by using LaTeX and a text editor instead of using a WYSIWYG environment.
Posted by: colin_zr at October 12, 2003 03:12 AM
Mitch, I put a side by side comparison with and without Silk on my site at http://vowe.net/archives/003692.html.
I installed this Haxie after my initial install of Notes on the Mac and found it to be much more usuable. I had not even noticed that Word also benefited from this Haxie.
Posted by: Volker Weber at October 14, 2003 04:40 PM
I haven't dealt with a fresh computer in a long time: do the browsers still default to Times10? For ages I avoided setting a tag in my wikilog because I believe in letting users pick their own preference for a default font. But finally the thought of newbies squinting away broke my resistence...
Posted by: Bill Seitz at October 14, 2003 06:33 PM
Chris & I are amazed that you have a 15" G4, as we felt for certain that you'd have gone with the 12" (with its full sized keyboard, even!).
Regardless, I'm with all of the Verdana lovers out there. Also, make sure your settings are correct in the General PrefPane for Font Smoothing Style (Medium - best for Flat Panel). Yes, you'll still need Haxie, but still.
Posted by: Helen at October 14, 2003 06:36 PM
Hello, Mitch:
Times is a "print font" and Verdana is a "screen font" ... that is, one is optimized for paper-and-ink and one for pixels.
Part of the problem is that as computer monitor resolution "increases" ... the size of the type on the screen "shrinks." This is because the algorithim for outputting the type to the screen does not use the extra pixels to provide definition. Instead, 72 points (type measurement that is approximately 1 inch) remain 72 pixels on a Mac; 72 points remain 96 pixels on a PC.
Thus, reducing pixel size also reduces the absolute size of the "word" on the screen.
Screen fonts like Verdana (Arial, Georgia, New York, etc) have been designed with a larger "x-height" (the size of lower case letters) to help increase legibility on the screen.
Posted by: kathy at October 15, 2003 10:39 AM
Hi Mitch,
You probably don't need Silk, as there is an option in Word Preferences to "Use Quartz Text Smoothing." This option should be enabled by default, and it accomplishes exactly the same thing as Silk. I believe that this is under the General section in Word's Prefs.
I like Verdana for Windows and Mac, and tend to use the Bitstream Vera fonts for Linux a lot.
Posted by: Chris Haumesser at October 22, 2003 09:11 AM
Sorry for pesking, but this is exactly problem with WYSIWYG approach. Editing environment should be IMHO radically different from what is supposed to be printed (why do you want to edit document in Times in the first place?). See what I mean at http://www.18james.com/lyx_on_aqua.html (which needs TeX in background, which is probably pretty big bite if you don't have it already; however, the page gives instructions how to install it).
Cheers,
Matej
Posted by: Matej Cepl at October 28, 2003 01:04 PM
If you were using Microsoft Windows, on laptops it supports ClearType, and there would be nothing to bitch about.
Why are you using the costly, evil Microsoft Product anyway? (Word)
Posted by: Kraft at November 14, 2003 06:11 AM
ClearType is just another attempt by MS to pretend that they invented something new - it is, in fact, vanilla sub-pixel rendering, with standard anti-aliasing thrown in. OS X does the same damn thing with Cocoa apps.
Posted by: Gern Blandstein at December 6, 2003 11:02 AM
Try HELVETICA
Thegrandfather of all readable font types)
Verdana is derivate of Helvetica.
Posted by: MiC at July 9, 2004 05:07 AM