Re: Font Issues

On 2007/11/21 14:05 (GMT) Rick Brandt apparently typed:

Felix Miata wrote:

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.

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.

Says who? There are differences between actual size and apparent size. A
factually 12pt font on a puter display is usually smaller than a 12pt font on
paper, because a puter display is usually read at a considerably greater
distance than are newspapers, books & magazines. 11px web page mousetype on
my display is smaller than the text newspapers that I don't buy any more
because their text is uncomfortably small predominantly use, and my display
to be a comfortable distance to use must be farther away than I can hold a
book, magazine or newspaper to read.

Traditionally, puter screen resolutions have been so low that jaggies
significantly degrade the quality at any apparent size. Anti-aliasing and
subpixel hinting were developed as an attempt to compensate, but they fail to
do the whole job even with somewhat higher current average resolutions. OTOH,
the higher end hardware has achieved high enough DPI that these kludges
wouldn't even be necessary for some people if operating systems weren't so
inept that people wouldn't want to use them even if they could afford them.
IOW, the trend is for the apparent quality difference between print and
screen has diminished and will continue to diminish, if slowly for a while
until OSes catch up with technology.

Then there's the problem that you don't actually know what size text is on
any display but your own. Some random px font size has no predictable
relationship to either actual size or apparent size. Common display DPI
varies from less than 50 to upwards of 140, with an upwards tendency since
several years being held back by the incompetence of the most common
operating system's handling of displayed objects when it deviates more than
modestly from its assumption of 96.

Note too that type size for print is often compromised in the interest of
paper cost - smaller type consumes less paper - a cost that has no
applicability on the web. I used to gobble up magazines when I was young. Now
the eyestrain they cause is too painful. Good thing the web came along to
take their place. Disappointing how hard it is to use most of it.

How do the fonts on a web page compare to the fonts in your Windows menus and
toolbars?

My Windows menus are irrelevant, because I don't use Windows for using web
pages. One reason for that is that among the many design stupidities of
Windows this is one of the most persistently irritating - its 8pt default
menu fonts are too small compared to application and web page fonts, and they
can't be adjusted to a more reasonable level without making titlebars
obscenely large, and breaking various system and application objects designed
for the assumed 96 DPI.

This system does not run Windows. Its menu fonts are a nominal 25% larger
(factually 36% larger) than the default menu fonts in doz - without doubling
the size of titlebars or breaking most system objects.

IMO they should be at least as large as that, but I see no reason for
them to be much larger.

Chris Morris wrote an answer to that with which I fully concur, and did quite
some time back: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/defaultsize.html#note1 . So, my
comfortable web page reading size turns out to be about 2pt nominally larger
than my (larger than average) menu text, which is more than double the actual
size of most web page 11px-12px mousetype. CSS small is the same size as my
menus, which is too small for comfortable reading of typical web page content.

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

This has probably been the case ever since corrective eyewear fell into a
price range the average person could afford, well over a hundred years ago. ;-)
--
" 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/
.

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