[porpoise]

When writing my dissertation, I found that changing the font to Comic Sans or Papyrus is an effective way of forcing myself to be self-critical and preventing myself from, for lack of a better phrase, "falling in love" with what I wrote (the "scholarly" classic-looking fonts like Sabon, Garamond, Baskerville tend to have that effect on me)

[ThePadawan]

This is why Bertrand Meyer formats all his lecture slides this way. See e.g. http://se.inf.ethz.ch/courses/2013a_spring/JavaCSharp/lectur...

It's readable enough for students to refer back to, but ugly enough that they prefer listening instead of reading along.

[mbo]

Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell committee) also formats all his lecture slides in Comic Sans: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bd1ia/spj_and_com...

[rakoo]

OpenBSD people have "weaponized" Comic Sans by confronting them about font bikeshedding instead of caring about what actually matters: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.ht...

[CornCobs]

In fact it's been so long since I've seen anyone use it for powerpoint slides (or anything really) that when I came across the "Wearing the hair shirt" talk recently I was hit with a nice nostalgic feeling: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/wearing...

[WalterGR]

This is why Bertrand Meyer formats all his lecture slides this way.

That's super interesting. Do you know where you learned that?

(Interestingly, your comment ranks #1 (after some videos) in Google's results for «bertrand meyer slide format».)

[ThePadawan]

I took several of his lectures during his tenure at ETH Zurich (some time between 2008 and 2014) and it came up at some point.

[amelius]

I'm surprised companies don't typeset their EULAs in Comic Sans.

But on second thought, I guess users don't read them anyway.

[ethbr0]

Changing font from Baskerville to Comic Sans is the equivalent of replacing the Queen's English with a New Jersey accent.

If the content bears up, you're probably onto something.

[zimpenfish]

Yeah, I think this is one of those things that keeps being recommended for writer's block or proofreading to shake you up and give you a fresh perspective.

[WalterGR]

Any visual change lets you see what you've written from a different perspective. Changing the font, changing the formatting (e.g. margins,) changing the page size, and (especially for me) reading it in a different format.

I learned this trick from someone years ago. (I think they specifically suggested reading it in a different format?) I wonder if it has a name...