I dislike the i, but that may be the Ple/Pie confusion.

Yep. This is the sort of reason why serif fonts come out easier to read for blocks of text.

fillip. jilli. And so on.

People will tell you over and over that sans-serif fonts are "easier to read", strangely. Mostly graphic designers though, and they tend to be not so much about the reading (I'm trying to be nice).

And it's scientific that the serifs make for readability. It's strange that people keep claiming the opposite.

I think what happened is between Netscape 2 and 3 it became possible to set the font face, which was always Times by default and everyone immediately changed theirs to a sans-serif, just to make a change, and ever since then it's been serif fonts old-fashioned, sans-serifs new.

IIRC, the argument goes that there's no doubt that serif is more readable for printed matter, where you have lots of resolution to ensure that the serifs are well defined, that's not the case when you are looking at the fonts on a screen, where the resolution is much lower.

it's scientific that the serifs make for readability.

Not on the web, apparently.

[edit: Another study showing the same results.]

Not on the web, apparently.

Interesting stuff. According to these conclusions, it seems we should be using Verdana, but at 10 point.

Verdana is one of the only fonts that doesn't look wacky to me in OSX, with anti-aliasing. Courier is impossible to read.

edit-- that is to say, if we reduce the Verdana to 10 point, and also the courier that the quotes are in, I will no longer be able to read the courier quotes.

it seems we should be using Verdana, but at 10 point.

I've got my viewing at ten point, and it still seems awfully big to me. I've gotten used to it, but it was a frustrating realization that Verdana 10pt. is a very different animal on a PC than a Mac. I prefer it on a Mac. But if I put it at eight point, which is good readability for me, everything else is so damned tiny. Eh, well.

I'll check out that readability thing in a sec, but I want to say a big wrod to this:

if we reduce the Verdana to 10 point, and also the courier that the quotes are in, I will no longer be able to read the courier quotes.

I find that. If I go down on font size because the Verdana's too big, then the courier is almost unreadable.

According to these conclusions, it seems we should be using Verdana, but at 10 point.

Oh, god, that is *so* a year ago.

...

Actually, seriously, I agree that it's easier to read sans-serif fonts (just not, like, Helvetica or Arial or any of *those* boxy ones) on the computer. I can read serif fonts, but then I need more white space around them so they sort themselves out in my head. Verdana 14 isn't the most perfect solution in the world, but I can't think of one that would work better.

Verdana is one of the only fonts that doesn't look wacky to me in OSX, with anti-aliasing. Courier is impossible to read.

It's true-- on my mother's computer, with 10.2, the fonts are anti-aliased out to *here*. They're more anti-aliasing than solid font. It's very hard to read.

OK this one: Readability of Fonts in the Windows Environment I'm kind of "eh..." about because they studied specific fonts, and quite ugly ones at that, and they seem to have studied them at weird sizes too. I don't quite get it and I'm not sure it's got wide applicability, at a first glance.

The other one, I don't know, it all seems scientific, except for his first table where he just chucks in numbers and we have to guess they mean "people who preferred this font".

I now hereby revise my position to "serifs are more readable in print" -- though nobody did the same comparison with print serif and sans-serif fonts, did they? -- and I prefer serif fonts for body text. But I'm old-fashioned.