Re: FN-FORUM: Junior Web Developer Position

date posted 18th March 2008 11:00

On 18/03/2008 11:50, Anthony Cartmell wrote:
>
>> 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...
>

True type is definitely on, helvetica looks even worse if it's off ;)

Unfortunately you can't rely on people having it on, I think the problem
might come from I have the true-type version installed. There might be
other versions that work (anyone want to send me one they know that
works and I'll test), but again you can't rely on people having the
right font. So what's best, hope they have the right font version or not
use it at all ?

>> 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?
>

I think verdana looks good on screen, if I get the choice I'd probably
specify verdana,arial,sans-serif as the font choices.

Just done a search and this page gives a bit of info on why helvetica
looking terrible:

http://brainstormsandraves.com/articles/typography/webfonts/

and then this one saying it's good:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/anatomy-web-fonts

Martin