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Hackernews defaults to Verdana—a known terrible font-design. Dashes should be visibly thinner than hyphens. And the reply-box is in monospace, so I can't see difference between the en- and the em-dash. In German we use the en-dash with leading and trailing space instead of the em-dash.

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If anyone else was surprised as I was to hear that Verdana was disliked, here's the most compelling argument I found against it:

While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc.

One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/legalese at very small font sizes--as long as it was unlikely to be printed.

Verdana was exquisitely well designed for the special problem of on-screen readability on the kind of screens that dominated in the mid-1990s, but, yeah, it's not 1996 any more.

On most screens these days, you are probably better off, if using a font of Verdana’s vintage or older, using one optimized for print legibility.

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