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by velox_io 2151 days ago
That font is hideous! It only extenuates the bottom of the text, especially on capitals which don't need enhancing because they're already in CAPS. Paragraphs of text in caps just become noise, blocks of letters rather than words.

That font also looks like the top of the line has been rubbed off, making things far worse as the top of the text has cues to recognise words. I believe that's my issue with caps as it makes words hard to read as I see blocks of letters, not words.

The biggest change I make the text easier to read is to increase the font size a couple of points or zoom in a little (ctrl + mouse wheel/ +-). Right now hacker news is at 150% zoom (snapped to the left side of a 43" 4K monitor).

Also, I prefer not use windows scaling as it wastes a lot of pixels with bigger menu bars (my eyesight is fine). One more thing... I'm very particular about the screen brightness (there's an app called clickMonitorDDC that let's you change screen brightness from mouse wheel or keyboard (crtl+shift+ up/ down)), and blue light filter at night. I find I can focus better in the evening/ night but I believe that's more of an ADHD thing.

1 comments

You have to remember that this isn't aimed at a typographer, its aimed at people who perceive text differently. size isn't always the answer.

Obviously its not going to be the next zilvertype. That to one side, I am curious to hear from people to see if it helps.

I get the intention, and if it wasn't obvious in my previous post; I have dyslexia. Font sizing on computer screens is complex, fonts don't scale perfectly, they have sweet spots where line thickness spills over. When you configure ClearType on Windows it's quite evident where curtain parts of curtain words spill over (a similar fashion to Open Dyslexic actually). Looking at different sized text, it's the line thickness that aids readability rather than the size of the font.

I pretty sure this is the basis of why serif fonts aren't as readable on computer displays, the serifs add more noise rather than help.