Serif vs Sans Serif on Forumosa

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21

Dude, IKR??

22

[quote=“hansioux, post:18, topic:154700”]

See how serif fonts gets all fuzzy even when the resolution goes down by a little in your screen cap.[/quote]

This comment doesn’t make any sense, and it’s not for the first time with you. Obviously, if you want to discuss font rendering (hopefully not with me, as I have no interest in having such a discussion), you need to be looking at the screenshot at its original size (click on it). What you are seeing and referring to are not “serif fonts” getting “fuzzy” because at this point there are no fonts anymore, it’s just a raster (pixel) image being resized, a process which results in scaling artifacts being introduced, especially if done just “by a little,” but none of this has anything to do with font rendering whatsoever.

No, it isn’t but it’s a matter of opinion anyway. You managed to miss the point here entirely and are now busy proving mine for me: the purpose of this screenshot was not to convince @Dynaflow to switch to the Caecilia font but to say that now anyone can use their favorite font on Forumosa. I set my browser to Caecilia, you set yours to Ubuntu Sans, and each of us can view our favorite website the way we like it. There doesn’t have to be the same font for everyone anymore.

This is a great flexibility to have, and whether the default font stays as serif or sans-serif is a comparatively minor issue but you should seriously fix your browser’s settings instead of vigorously advocating for the latter here because next week it might be another website you frequent that makes a similar font change, and they might not be as accommodating to even allow a discussion about it.

[quote=“hansioux, post:18, topic:154700”]Oh yeah, that’s the open source and free Ubuntu font. You can download it. Did I mention it’s free?

[/quote]
Yes, tell us more about Ubuntu please! The thread titled: Serif vs Sans Serif on Forumosa seems just the perfect place to do so.

23

Your original comment seems like what you dislike is Arial and not Sans in general. You would only have that Arial problem if you use Windows, especially legacy windows with its legacy fonts.

Similar to your suggestion for people to switch their browser default Serif font to a Sans font type, I’m suggesting people who have issues with legacy Arial fonts to simply switch their system default Sans font type to a free modern font.

Fonts aren’t just scaled and compressed in screen caps. People scale their screens all the time, even more so these days on mobile devices. If you don’t like the screen cap example, let me give you a live example.

This is the full size screen cap (with compression, but looks the same as the original to my eyes) of a word editor featuring Sans (Ubuntu font) on the left, and Serif (Times New Roman) on the right. Both columns have identical texts. Serif column uses 12 font size, and Sans uses 11.5 to give them similar x height.

I then scaled it using the word editor’s zoom control to 80% of the original size. At this point, it’s still the system rendering the font. Let me know which one is easier to read. If you think it’s just the Times New Roman, I can show you the exact same effect with a modern Serif font.

By the way, I don’t mean any personal attack, and would like the topic to stay on the technical side. If there’s any perceived offense, I apologize.

24

If Bob Marley was still alive he would vote sans serif.

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25

Probably I-rie-al.

26

Because he shot the serif?

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27

Excellent!

This reminds me of San Serriffe, an island nation with capital in [Bodoni] (Bodoni - Wikipedia), industry hub Port Clarendon and major tourist destination Garamondo ruled by an authoritarian President M.J. Pica, who took over from Generalissimo Minion.

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28

92DPI on my standard company issue work monitor (1080p/24inch).

Also according to this article, yep… laptop screens still mostly suck.

This lowest common denominator is why I don’t agree with defaulting to serif just yet. Also most people won’t know about being able to change their default font or bother with it even if you tell them.

29

@JustifiedAndAncient That is an excellent article. Laptop screens in 2016 still suck, and it’s not just the resolution but the ubiquitous low-quality TN panels. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, definitely look for an IPS screen. (This and an SSD are the two upgrades really worth it.)

For the record, my idea was to use serif fonts for post content only (large blocks of decently-sized text). I’d keep the sans-serif font for all the peripheral messages (buttons, meta-information, topic title header etc.), especially anything shown in smaller sizes (user names, category names). Perhaps even topic titles in the topic list.

I’ve just looked at Forumosa in another Chrome installation where I kept the default font settings, and in an ancient version of Internet Explorer. It’s reasonable to expect most people never change the default font settings, as very few sites take these into account anyway (of the large ones, I think only Wikipedia does), and Forumosa should look great to those people too. At the moment it doesn’t indeed, especially as some of the buttons, including Reply, are still rendered in Arial, while there is also a lot of Times New Roman scattered around. I agree that serif fonts, particularly the default Times New Roman, do not excel at small sizes. Apologies for not noticing it earlier as an issue as in my default browser I have both serif and sans-serif set to the same font.

@tempogain Continuing the experiment, can we try to keep the serif font for post content only and go back to the original font settings (or sans-serif) for everything else?

(If these settings cannot be easily decoupled, i.e. you can only change everything at the same time or nothing at all easily, that would be a strong argument in favor of setting it to sans-serif.)

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30

Hmm I tried something, but unsuccessfully. I’m not sure how that would be accomplished. We’d have to look at it. I’m not sure it’s a problem–I’m using Liberation Serif and I didn’t even notice it until you mentioned it. Now that I’m aware of it, it still doesn’t bother me in the limited places where it appears.

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