Re: FN-FORUM: Junior Web Developer Position

date posted 18th March 2008 10:25

> I wish people wouldn't use helvetica, it always looks terrible for me,
> I'm guessing the same will happen to other people too:

Looks like you have ClearType(TM) turned off...

> http://www.spodnet.net/misc/helvetica-firefox.gif
> http://www.spodnet.net/misc/helvetica-ie.gif
> http://www.spodnet.net/misc/helvetica-opera.gif
>
> Shockingly, safari on windows shows it correctly (does it have an
> internal copy of the font instead of using the system one ?)
>
> http://www.spodnet.net/misc/helvetica-safari.gif

Safari doesn't use ClearType for it's anti-aliasing, so fonts look
generally nicer but slightly more blurred on a Windows machine.

It's your display settings, rather than the font choice, that's the
problem here, I think. Sadly (probably a Good Thing) there's no way for a
website to specify what sort of anti-aliasing the viewer uses. This caused
some confusion for my last big job: the customer kept complaining that the
text looked "blocky": they had absolutely no anti-aliasing on their fonts
at all, so _all_ text on their monitors looked blocky! I told them how to
switch on ClearType on and they were amazed at how much clearer everything
was...

> Helvetica just doesn't work as a screen font in my opinion and should be
> left as a print font ;)

Helvetica and Arial are pretty-much the only sans-serif fonts that are
reliably installed on machines. Other nice fonts, like Trebuchet MS, are
often available, but look even more horrible with ClearType turned off...
I thought IE7 turned ClearType on by default: did you manually turn it off
again?

What are your favourite screen fonts?

Cheers!

Anthony
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