BlackWindBooks.com | Newsletter! | risingthumb.xyz | achtung.risingthumb.xyz | github.com/RisingThumb | site map

risingthumb.xyz Mmm... is that gasoline I smell?

The value of Serifs

Whenever I am selecting a font for use in any project, one of the most important things for me is legibility. Sometimes I will use sans serifs if it is more informal or brief, however Serifs tends to be more readable.

This can be demonstrated easily by asking people how they read the.glTF file format. I have seen and heard people call it .gITF which is a result of various sans serifs fonts failing to distinguish l, L, I, i and 1.

This is an issue that makes them indistinguishable. Among the worst occurrences are where you manually, letter by letter copy passwords, keys or URLs and most of the time they are displayed in sans serifs when what the individual character is, can't be intuited from context and has a high amount of importance. Dyslexia friendly fonts focus on exaggerated serifs OR make up for a lack of it in another way with distinct silhouettes.

Even monospaced fonts tend to have serifs as the actual characters in your magical incantations have to be exactly correct.

Note that not all sans serif fonts fail at this. Most... Embarrassingly do. This is my top issue with fonts, just behind bad kerning. It is also probably why it's a default in plain html browsers... Because it's a sensible default.

Published on 2024/03/27

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

THE REPUBLIC #4

FUNHOLE My wife isn't coming back. Should have seen that one coming. It's funny. Some jurisdictions have given themselves over completely to personalist regimes, wherein each nominal leader they've installed is said to embody their legislation …

via I'm not really Stanley Lieber. July 9, 2025

Old Computer Challenge 2025 > -- Old Tech, New Tricks

Hello and welcome to the Old Computer Challenge - 2025 Edition! This is the second year when I’m participating, and if you didn’t see my previous year’s entry, you can check the OCC24 - Party like it’s 2004 article, although it’s not mandatory. Since last …

via andrei.xyz July 9, 2025

My Apple iBook G4 - hardware upgrades

This is the sixth part of the “My Apple iBook G4” series of articles, and it’s all about the hardware upgrades you can do to your iBook G4 12". As you probably know by now, I bought myself an Apple iBook G4 12" laptop (1.2GHz/256/30G/Combo/APX) at …

via sizeof(cat) July 8, 2025

Generated by openring