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What is your preferred font?

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40hz:
I always get a headache when switching fonts but everytime I was put in a position where I just want to rip everything apart, I always settled on Arial as lame as that probably is for font enthusiasts.
-Paul Keith (September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM)
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I have received my share of criticism for my love of Arial.
-app103 (September 05, 2009, 12:38 PM)
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Sod the snobs and enthusiasts. I sometimes think of myself as a connoisseur of fine typography. (So much so that I had to look up the spelling of the word connoisseur  :mrgreen:) But I'll never diss anyone for liking Ariel. Especially since there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's a very workmanlike font - and one of the better screen fonts for web use.

I think it's also  important to distinguish between what works well on screen as opposed to what works well in print. They're two completely different things. And the overall design and optical considerations should reflect that. Screen resolution is usually 96-dpi. Print resolution can range anywhere from 1200 dpi on up to the absolute resolution of the output device and media.

Ariel was primarily designed to be a screen font. As a result, it's metrics and kerning are optimized for screen resolutions. IMHO, it doesn't look that great when you print it out at 1200 dpi (especially when you compare it to 'printer fonts' such as Helvetica or Univers), but that's just a matter of personal taste. If you grew up on TrueType fonts and laser printers, I doubt you'd have the issues the old typesetting crowd has with Ariel. Again, it's just a matter of taste - and what you've been taught to look for in a font. Neither is intrinsically better. They're just different.

And besides, it's all about readability. At least in my book. One of the biggest complaints I have (with a lot of what passes for 'graphic design') is the tendency of many designers to treat text as just another graphic element. Text is not a graphic. Text is meant to be read. And anything that interferes with that is poor design.

So when people say things like:

I just find that Arial is a very comfortable font to look at for long periods of time. Other fonts tend to make my eyes tired, rather quickly.
-app103 (September 05, 2009, 12:38 PM)
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and...

I'm not kidding. Sure I can tolerate alot of these fonts and I currently have Verdana in Opera and of course Times New Roman is default in MS Word but when you put a gun to my head, I always default to Arial. It just seems like the font that gives me the least headache regardless of text size, text zoom and text formatting.
-Paul Keith (September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM)
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...it just makes me wonder what possible argument anybody can really make against a font like Ariel?

Fonts are like wine. What's the best? Answer: the one you like.

 :)

Paul Keith:
Okay, it's the third time in a row I added wow to something I posted in the internet but @40hz, wow...  :Thmbsup:

Eóin:
For me it's usually Calibri for Windows Interface. Size 8 primarily as it increases the amount of screen real estate available. Candara is not without it's charm for the same purpose and I do switch to it from time to time. I find both are very easy on the eyes.

For printed text I use Calibri a lot again, it's the default in Word 2007 anyway. Serifs are nice too of course but most things I print are articles or documents just that bit too long of screen reading and invariably I tend to use sans-serifs almost all the time.

For programming I use either Consolas or more often MS Reference Sans. It comes with Office 2007 and for C++ coding in VS it can't be beaten. And yes, it is variable width (I can hear cries of blasphemy already).

f0dder:
Eóin: how on earth can you live with a variable width font for coding? BLASPHEMER! Hell, for coding, anything else than Dina is blasphemy in my eyes.

PS: that memcpy()ing code looks somewhat dirty to me :)

Eóin:
Not my code actually, I think it's from a WTL header :)

I find a variable width font very pleasant to work with. You can still use tabs for indentation and other alignment but as I read somewhere online when contemplating the switch- once things stop lining up you stop wanting them to line up.

Choosing the font was hard though. Most don't have enough space around punctuation, symbols and brackets which is really needed for coding where these thing occur in high densities. After a lenghty online search it turned out the perfect font was already on my PC, MS Reference Sans Serif comes with Office 2007.

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