Information
Photography
Syndicate This Blog
Thursday, April 5. 2007
Plague of Small Fonts
There is a plague of tiny sans-serif fonts being used for body text on the web. I find sans-serif to be difficult enough to read without it being tiny as well, and am rather certain the prevalence of this type of text is one of the primary reasons people find it uncomfortable to read book-length material on computer screens; that and cheap low-ppi (pixels per inch) monitors. Even I find sans-serif fonts more readable on low-ppi monitors, as such monitors reproduce serifs poorly, but I can't read for a long period of time on those either.
There are hacks available to change sans-serif fonts on-screen to larger or (as I use in cases where I will be reading a lot) serif fonts using CSS. For most sites which I only browse occasionally I find NoSquint more practical. This handy Firefox plugin allows you to conditionally resize text on pages in an easy and site-specific way, and it remembers your size settings on the next site visit.
There are hacks available to change sans-serif fonts on-screen to larger or (as I use in cases where I will be reading a lot) serif fonts using CSS. For most sites which I only browse occasionally I find NoSquint more practical. This handy Firefox plugin allows you to conditionally resize text on pages in an easy and site-specific way, and it remembers your size settings on the next site visit.
Most people find sans-serif fonts to be more visually pleasing from a design aspect, especially on the low-ppi computer monitors they are using, which is why these are so prevalent on the web. This is likely to continue until monitors reach pixel pitches approaching paper resolutions. (And the web gains better font support than the horrible flash hacks you have to use today, but that's an issue for another time.)
When buying monitors today, the general public looks at size and price. For example, take the 23" Apple Cinema display. Many people complain, saying it is more expensive and should be replaced with a 24" panel (for example this Dell 24" display). However, the 23" display has the same resolution as most 24" units; the size increase gains nothing but pixelized text and a larger footprint. Most would buy a cheaper 24" display thinking they are getting more, but as a result they do not gain the ppi advantages, then wonder why their eyes tire and they keep finding themselves going back to paper for long text.
Undoubtedly for some people an improvement from ~72 ppi to Apple's across-the-line ~100 ppi is not enough. Even if it is, they don't realize it due to not knowing how to adjust their OS of choice to show text at the same size on that 100 ppi monitor as on the 72 ppi monitor to gain text clarity improvements.
I don't see things improving for the general public until the monitor industry starts pushing their next generation of high ppi monitors and OS vendors simplify support for higher ppi values.
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks