Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Crash course on computer fonts

Please. This is a public service announcement to all teachers preparing course packs. Please.

STOP TYPING YOUR TEXTS IN ARIAL 12!

At least have the decency of using Times! Here's my beef: Arial is a relatively large font. It is so large, in fact, that most teachers who know what they're talking about will request assignments to be printed either in Times 12, or Arial 10. A large font in course packs makes for a lot of pages. WAY too many pages. AND it's not very practical, because a given text will span many pages, whereas it could be squeezed into 2 or 3, thereby offering a more satisfactory experience to the reader who likes to have a more global view of the text.

Please. I do not want to be obliged to flip 2 pages to find the end of a sentence that began 2 pages earlier.

Plus, using Arial 12 is juvenile. Remember when, back in the days when the teacher gave an assignment, and you had nothing to write, and tried to find the largest possible font just to make it look like you wrote a lot, and fooling no one in the process?

Yeah. Exactly.

Moreover, it's a waste of paper. And a pain for the students who are lugging their stuff around.

So please. STOP WRITING IN ARIAL.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

wiki: Serif

"In traditional printing serifed fonts are used for body text because they are considered easier to read than sans-serif fonts for this purpose.[1] Sans-serif fonts are more often used in headlines, headings, and shorter pieces of text and subject matter requiring a more casual feel than the formal look of serifed types.

Serifed fonts are the overwhelming typeface choice for lengthy text printed in books, newspapers and magazines.[2] For such purposes sans serif fonts are more acceptable in Europe than in North America, but still less common than serifed typefaces.

While in print serifed fonts are considered more readable, sans-serif is considered more legible on computer screens.[citation needed] For this reason the majority of web pages employ sans-serif type.[3] Hinting information, anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering technologies have partially mitigated the legibility problem of serif fonts on screen. But the basic constraint of screen resolution — typically 100 pixels per inch or less — and small font sizes continues to limit their readability on screen."