Verdana and other web fonts -- opinions sought

[Headless]

Lucida Sans is even on my Win98 PC.

Not on mine (I have only added 4 or 5 fonts to the ones that are
installed by default), I do have Lucida Console.


Headless

 

[Headless]

My big beef is that you set the font size statically, so I can't make it big
enough to actually read. For example, default text size is "16px". That
doesn't help me on my screen.

The much maligned absolute font sizing actually prevents one of the
fundamental font problems from occurring (relative font sizing suffers
from a fundamental flaw). Unfortunately in turn it causes problems on
high res displays, and there's the IE "don't want to resize px fonts"
bug of course.


Headless

 

[jake]

I've been looking at web fonts lately, trying to decide whether I
should drop Verdana from my personal site in favor of some other
typeface. Despite the fact that it is a very readable font, I know that
there are valid technical reasons to not use Verdana as a default font.
[snip]


All opinions are most welcome.

Jim Royal <[email protected]>
"Understanding is a three-edged sword"
Calendar: http://jimroyal.com/calendar
Visit http://jimroyal.com

MS used to (freely) make available a number of fonts which were,
apparently, designed with the screen in mind.

Consequently, I tend to use 'Trebuchet' as my standard sans-serif font,
and 'Georgia' for serif.

Personally, my preference would be to use Georgia for body text, but
I've tended to use Trebuchet, as a number of studies have shown that
people with dyslexia prefer to see a sans-serif font.

regards.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

I have OSX and Win2K side by side on my desktop and the Mac has beautiful
anti-aliasing (I'm looking at a web page with Verdana fonts), noticeably
smoother than my Win2K box, I'd say. BTW, OSX has practically nothing in
common with Linux at the graphical display level.

I tend to agree with Dylan. With GTK2/xft2 at least, the fonts are
rendered quite similarly to Jim's OS X example. It is not exactly the
same, but closer to the OS X style than the Windows style.

Compare:
http://www.jimroyal.com/fonts/verdana.gif
http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/scratch/gtk2-verdana.png

Of course with older toolkits, the fonts are antialiased less well or not
at all, so look closer to the Windows style.

 

[Jim Royal]

What resolution, etc. were you running on the Win2K box?

1024x768 at 32-bit.

www.jimroyal.com looks fine on my Windows XP PC. Of course I run at
1600x1200 on my desktop to ensure smooth anti-aliasing.

Screen resolution doesn't affect the quality of anti-aliasing. You get
exactly the same anti-aliasing at 640x480. The only difference is that
at 1600x1200, you might be enlarging the fonts, so they are rendered
wth more pixels.

The current site is using Verdana. which is why the site looks good on
your PC. For this reason, I provided screen shots of something other
than Verdana -- specifically Lucida Sans / Lucida Grande.

My big beef is that you set the font size statically, so I can't make it big
enough to actually read. For example, default text size is "16px". That
doesn't help me on my screen.

At the time the site was written, I was unaware that Windows machines
were unable (and are still unable) to resize fonts specified in pixels.
I plan to rewrite the site using CSS-P, and yes, I'll be using either
percentages or ems for the font sizes.

The first step in rewriting the site is to reconsider the font being
used.

If you want to view the pages in question rendered on your own machine,
rather than in a snapshot, here they are:

The original page using Verdana:

<http://jimroyal.com/techwr/writing_procedures.html>

The CSS-P version using Lucida Sans / Lucia Grande:

<http://www.jimroyal.com/new/>

So, the question still remains: What font would you use?

 

[Headless]

At the time the site was written, I was unaware that Windows machines
were unable (and are still unable) to resize fonts specified in pixels.

Tut, tut, IE specific problem, nowt to do with Windows.


Headless

 

[Jim Royal]

Tut, tut, IE specific problem, nowt to do with Windows.

True. But for 95% of Windows users, there's no distinction.

 

[Phrederik]

The much maligned absolute font sizing actually prevents one of the
fundamental font problems from occurring (relative font sizing suffers
from a fundamental flaw). Unfortunately in turn it causes problems on
high res displays, and there's the IE "don't want to resize px fonts"
bug of course.

It's not a bug. 10 pixel is 10 pixels, regardless of resolution.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

It's not a bug. 10 pixel is 10 pixels, regardless of resolution.

What is 10px in a media="print" style sheet? If the printer does 720 dots
per inch, is 10px 1/72 of an inch?

You see, in a web context, all measurements really have to be adjustable
to the media to which they relate.

So it is sensible for a browser to map a "CSS pixel" to a "screen pixel"
by default, but it should be able to scale a "CSS pixel" up or down.

 

[andy johnson]

I've been looking at web fonts lately, trying to decide whether I
should drop Verdana from my personal site in favor of some other
typeface. Despite the fact that it is a very readable font, I know that
there are valid technical reasons to not use Verdana as a default font.

Lucida is a good-looking font that is installed by default on a fairly
large number of computers. It doesn't have the chunky child-handwriting
look that some of the glyphs in Verdana has. It looks pretty good on OS
X. But on Windows...

So I have been following this thread with great interest, and did some
research on my own too. Quite the education. I saw this article from a
Google search and about spit my coffee out!
http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/edesign4.htm

"Of all the Web fonts, Microsoft's Verdana, Georgia and Trebuchet are
by far the most popular. Their success due to their technical quality,
on-screen legibility and their almost ubiquitous cross-platform
availability.

Today on the Web, the old typesetting axiom "When in doubt, use
Caslon", should probably be updated, at least temporarily, to read
"When in doubt, use Verdana". Verdana is the most widely distributed
font designed specifically for use on the Web. Verdana was released by
Microsoft as a free, redistributable download in 1996, was rolled into
Microsoft Internet Explorer the following year, and so found its way
onto every new Mac and Windows installation shortly afterwards. "

Andy
-
"There would be a lot more civility in this world if people
didn't take that as an invitation to walk all over you"
- (Calvin and Hobbes)

 

[andy johnson]

Which is largely true. The source of the problems lies not with these
fonts.

Percent, px and em font sizing are all fundamentally broken, this is not
Verdana's fault.


Headless

So you are saying that if you let the user select the font size,
Verdanas not so bad?

Andy
-
"There would be a lot more civility in this world if people
didn't take that as an invitation to walk all over you"
- (Calvin and Hobbes)

 

[Headless]

"Of all the Web fonts, Microsoft's Verdana, Georgia and Trebuchet are
by far the most popular. Their success due to their technical quality,
on-screen legibility and their almost ubiquitous cross-platform
availability.

Which is largely true. The source of the problems lies not with these
fonts.

Percent, px and em font sizing are all fundamentally broken, this is not
Verdana's fault.


Headless

 

[Headless]

So you are saying that if you let the user select the font size,
Verdanas not so bad?

No. All methods of specifying font types and sizes are fundamentally
broken, including specifying nothing.


Headless

 

[Jim Royal]

Today on the Web, the old typesetting axiom "When in doubt, use
Caslon", should probably be updated, at least temporarily, to read
"When in doubt, use Verdana". Verdana is the most widely distributed
font designed specifically for use on the Web. Verdana was released by
Microsoft as a free, redistributable download in 1996, was rolled into
Microsoft Internet Explorer the following year, and so found its way
onto every new Mac and Windows installation shortly afterwards. "

I agree that Verdana is a remarkably readable font. However, it has one
drawback. When designing a site with verdana (with its enourmous width
and x-height), there is the temptation to use a smaller font size to
make Verdana more attractive. If then site visitor does not have
Verdana, however, the result is very small text.

Thus, Verdana presents a usability problem. Which is why I'm
considering dropping it.

Perhaps I should look at my web logs, and make c calculation of just
how many visitors are using systems that likely do not have Verdana...

 

[andy johnson]

Perhaps I should look at my web logs, and make c calculation of just
how many visitors are using systems that likely do not have Verdana...

Don't forget, any user who has ever had a ms product installed on
their machine will have had their stock font pack installed too. This
of course means that Verdana will be there. You should probably think
of it in terms of who cannot possibly have had a ms product installed.

Andy
-
"There would be a lot more civility in this world if people
didn't take that as an invitation to walk all over you"
- (Calvin and Hobbes)

 

[Headless]

I agree that Verdana is a remarkably readable font. However, it has one
drawback. When designing a site with verdana (with its enourmous width
and x-height),

The width is indeed greater than most other sans serif fonts, but the
x-height is on par with most other sans serif fonts.

there is the temptation to use a smaller font size to
make Verdana more attractive.

That's a big part of the problem, and an argument not to set a very
small size, but it's not really an argument to drop Verdana. Things work
fairly reliably when you don't go below 90%.

If then site visitor does not have
Verdana, however, the result is very small text.

Another situation is that if a user has a reduced height sans serif font
installed as the default font in the browser, the widely championed
author relative font sizing with percentages will result in micro fonts
because the UA's default font is used as the basis for the relative size
calculation.


Headless

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Don't forget, any user who has ever had a ms product installed on
their machine will have had their stock font pack installed too. This
of course means that Verdana will be there.

I don't think Windows 95 came with Verdana, nor any version of Windows
prior to that.

People with brand new Macs may not get it (I'm not sure) as IE is no
longer *the* Mac browser.

No Linux distributions include it by default, but it is an easy (and
popular) download (Google, "core fonts", I'm Feeling Lucky)

 

[andy johnson]

I don't think Windows 95 came with Verdana, nor any version of Windows
prior to that.

People with brand new Macs may not get it (I'm not sure) as IE is no
longer *the* Mac browser.

No Linux distributions include it by default, but it is an easy (and
popular) download (Google, "core fonts", I'm Feeling Lucky)

Yea, I forgot about the pre Win 98 era. They don't call us square
heads for nothing.


-
Andy

"There would be a lot more civility in this world if people
didn't take that as an invitation to walk all over you"
- (Calvin and Hobbes)

 

[Jim Royal]

I don't think Windows 95 came with Verdana, nor any version of Windows
prior to that.

True -- this is a good point.

The number of people using Windows 95 visiting my site is quite small
-- on the order of 1.6% of the total. And most of this is me, as I use
Win95 to test IE 5.5 when I'm designing sites.

People with brand new Macs may not get it (I'm not sure) as IE is no
longer *the* Mac browser.

Not yet, but this may change when OS X 10.3 is released.

I'm beginning to feel that Verdana is still a safe choice after all.

 

[C A Upsdell]

True -- this is a good point.

Actually, it is an irrelevant point. Verdana and the other core Microsoft
fonts came with a variety of IE updates: the version of the O/S is not
important here; the version of IE is.