FONTS!

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Bosola

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So, what's everyone's preferences for fonts? I've an allergic reaction to Times New Roman - not because it shows some lack of originality or worse, care, but because it's an ugly, uneven, unpleasant font to read. Look at some placeholder text in a word processor under TNR - there are spacing issues, the text looks 'grainy' and uneven. Ugh.

Lately, I've become a big fan of Gentium where it's available, or resigned myself to using Trebuchet when I can't guarantee my readers have the font. Does anyone here have any 'proper' fonts (not symbols) they're particular about?

I'm probably one of only, ooh, three people interested in this, but there's an interesting review on the issue of whether serif or non-serif fonts are more readable. Their conclusions: there's no good evidence for assuming either is easier to follow. See it here: http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html#part2
 
Oh wow, I was thinking about making a thread about fonts a few days ago. ;D

I actually like Times; I suppose I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to fonts.

I've recently started to use Helvetica Neue for all text documents that I read on my PC. It looks much better on screen than old-fashioned Helvetica, which is definitely a print font (to an extent, Times is more of a print font than a screen one as well). However, it looks bad when the font size is small, so for browsing I use Arial Unicode MS for sans serif, Gerogia for serif and Courier New for monospace with a minumum font size of 16. Despite the bad press it gets, Arial (and to a greater extent, Arial Unicode) is a perfectly fine font for reading on screen.

As for serif vs sans serif, I've heard that serif is better for printed text and sans serif is better for reading on a screen. Personally I think that sans serif is better for reading on screen and for short pieces of printed text (such as billboards and such; Helvetica is brilliant for these purposes) whereas serif is better for walls of printed text such as books and newspapers because the serifs make the lines seem more "defined" and easy to follow. I suppose this is why one hardly ever sees novels printed with sans serif typefaces.

Also, I don't hate Papyrus. :P
 
There are plenty of 'old' fonts, and 'traditional looking fonts' other than Times. Like Garamond, which is about 400 years old. Times is just unpleasant. The Helveticas always looked uncompromisingly utilitarian to me; as for fixed width, Proggy is supposed to be great for coding.

But Gentium is gorgeous:

Gentium_sample_alpha.png
 
Constantia is a nice one. Really, anything included with Office 2007 with a name beginning with co- is good.
 
Everyone loves comic sans. Its a known fact that i just made up.
 

How could I forget this! ;D

0:30-40 is particularly funny.
 
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