notes

[kaberett]

• One of the things Type:Rider explained to me (possibly), is why it is that I hate Times New Roman so much, namely that it was (apparently) designed to remain legible when printed cheaply on low-quality paper, which is to say, absolutely not the context even of printing at home these days (let alone screen display).
  
• I was briefly worried that in fact I just hate all serif fonts, given that I also loathe Computer Modern, but apparently everyone hates Computer Modern so I can just retreat hissing back into the shadows of Garamond, or something.
  
• One of the things my supervisor keeps saying to me about my writing is that she understands what I mean but I need to unpack a lot! more! and I keep being wildly miscalibrated as to what this actually looks like. I HAVE REALISED (late last night, when I really wanted to have already been asleep, but so it goes) that some of what's going on here is that I'm writing to her-as-audience because I really don't have a good sense of General Geochemistry Knowledge in the field (for a variety of reasons this margin etc) and I have spent a lot of time trying to express ideas etc specifically to her in writing so... no wonder, really! Which will hopefully let me adjust expectations accordingly and maybe start writing in a more appropriately targeted fashion in Science Contexts.

Comments

[mdlbear]

So apparently I'm one of the few people who actually _likes_ Computer Modern (perhaps because I took Data Structures and Compilers from Knuth back in the day) -- at least on paper. It's less good as a screen font, but so are almost all sans-serif fonts; they make it difficult if not impossible to distinguish "l", "I", and "1". That's lowercase L, uppercase I, and numeral 1, in case you're using one of those.

Great realization about your writing -- that's huge.

[damerell]

I like Computer Modern. (My father has a cheque for $2.56...)

[passingbuzzards]

hm, is it really specifically low quality paper? i'd read that times new roman/serif fonts are more legible in print generally, whereas sans serif fonts are (obviously) much more legible on a screen

(relatedly, back when i had optic neuritis in 2018 and everything was monstrously blurry i started aggressively setting all of my work documents to arial despite the fact that times new roman is our standard formatting for letters and so forth [which, since everything is submitted to USCIS in print, fair enough perhaps] and now one of the attorneys i work with and i are engaged in a perpetual silent war of swapping the font back and forth on whatever we're working on. *g* i just don't want to have to squint at serifs on a computer screen, dave!)

also thinking about how the default font on kindle paperwhite (which is super hi res) is bookerly, which is a serif font but definitely feels easier to read on that type of screen—but it’s also an E Ink screen, so it’s closer to being like paper (which would maybe support the “better on paper in general” theory??)

[me_and]

Common wisdom is serif fonts for print in general, yes. Times New Roman in particular was apparently designed specifically for being legible with poor quality printing on poor quality paper; it was designed for the Times newspaper in the era of metal type, when the volume of daily papers being printed necessitated using cheap paper stock and limited the ability to do quality checking while still meeting the morning print deadlines.

[passingbuzzards]

ahh, how interesting! thank you for this knowledge

[silveradept]

These seem like useful pieces of information to work with and understand, so well done. And hopefully someone can give you a barometer of what the audience you are writing for does and does not know.

[elf]

I like slab serifs for screen reading; they avoid the 1/l/I problems without having the pixel problems that some serifs get. It's hard to find slab serifs that aren't headline fonts, though. I adore the one in the Kindle (I don't have a Kindle, but have seen them) which I think is Caecilia, which is not free and not cross-platform. (As in, you can wind up with different versions on Windows and Mac and have weird display and printing issues.) I wind up using Aleo a lot. Adelle is also nice.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to $someone-I've-forgotten I've set Atkinson Hyperlegible as my default font and I'm liking it a lot!

I'm a serious type snob (calligraphy, typesetting, and book design in previous lives) and Atkinson isn't pretty but it certainly lives up to its name onscreen. It's a sans serif that explicitly makes every character unique: as shown in the link above, 1 i I l are distinctive even when purposefully blurred.

Not enough to use while in a migraine, but I've become more comfortable with text-to-speech apps on my iPhone.