Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)
practicaltypography.com
practicaltypography.com
- https://100r.co/site/home.html
Where Times really shines is printed material. I find it (and Garamond) extremely easy to read.
For longform screen reading, I usually prefer Georgia, Freight Text, Source Serif, and Tiempos. San Francisco is a nice sans-serif font for this, too.
I see Helvetica Neue with fallback to Arial, and I checked that it's not my CSS.
Verdana is pretty crappy for texts of even a comment length, as it's wide as heck. I have to hack it out with CSS on sites that I use regularly, or the eye gets tired in minutes.
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;As a more readable version of Times New Roman, I like Georgia. It too was commissioned by Microsoft as a web font.
And I don't need to choose between the hyper-tight Helvetica and a bunch of MS fonts from the 90s, because thankfully the world is not limited to them.
HN, for instance, can’t be zoomed in iOS.
Also, the above macwright cuts off the titles to make room for the Dates, so to me the site looks like:
Rec...2020-06-01
Sec...2020-05-10
Link...2020-05-02
Rec...2020-05-01
Both pinch-to-zoom and increasing font size work for me in iOS Safari, what zoom are you talking about?
[1]: http://philosophica.christopherdumas.org [2]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Literata?query=liter
On top of that, Jekyll doesn't add any weight for the client.
Sorry, the mentioning of Makefiles brought that back. In any case, you might be right, but it's a very simple website and Jekyll is easier. I'll cross the bridge of incompatibility when I come to it. Thanks for the heads up though!
Websites in C are alright, but this sounds like a crazy setup.
In my case, there is no C and the makefile does only "cat header.html $^ footer.html > $@"
The somewhat-recent slew of ‘This is a website’ pages don't come close to PT in terms of just being nice to look at.
Links were just plain black with no decoration, making me have to guess at every click what was navigation.
Conventions are useful.
Those red circle links are particularly tricky to spot. You have no idea how many of the words prior to the circle are part of the link, so your best option is to try and click the tiny circle.
https://dwell.com (not text only but good use of imagery in a non distracting way.)
You can set your preferred font families in your browser's settings that would be used exactly in case of "no page author font preference". (You can even tweak default sizes, and even default colours, but setting wildly unusual default colours just reveals flaws in most author styles, so are not very practical, unfortunately.)
It is quite widely known fact (I think) but probably very rarely used feature; sorry for 'mansplaining' -- I bet you all know this and I would not be surprised if some of fellow HN readers even have non-default settings in there.
> I usually prefer Georgia [...]
What a coincidence, I read HN (and Wikipedia) in Georgia font, but not because of default browser settings, but because of site-specific user styles. I like my browser to be real "user agent".
I think the degree to which serifs aid legibility is overstated. Any studies are likely biased through familiarity of serif fonts by test subjects, since that’s what most printed reading material used.
> It was created for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts
yet all the alternatives are almost exactly the same width. Plantin is even a bit narrower. How do they "avoid its shortcomings"?
The second flaw is "italic is mediocre", which I'm not in a position to judge.
The third (and main) complaint is "it connotes apathy", and one of the suggested alternatives is:
> EQUITY (designed by me).
I'm all for artists promoting their work, as long as they're honest about it. This page is basically an ad, right?
"It connotes apathy" is a bit like accusing someone who eats enough vegetables of being "apathetic".
The site started years ago purely as an "educate yourself about fonts and stop using the fucking defaults!" site.
A big part of the ubiquity of TNR is the fact that Monotype created a large number of extensions to the type family for specialized uses such as mathematics and non-Latin typesetting.
https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.htm...
However, Firefox Preview on my phone doesn't seem to answer my efforts towards the aesthetic bliss and refuses to load the font.
BTW, my personal favorite free serif font is Merriweather—particularly for reading long texts. It's somewhat overused on the web, but it's so much better than the next thing. It has the exact right ‘density’, and the shapes are playful just enough to not tire out the eye.
As for sans-serif, alas! If I could have Rosario with good kerning and support for more languages, or Optima with a bit less contrast and more humanistic shapes—I'd be so happy. Until then, it's back to Fira Sans again and again.
The choice of implementation for these fonts should be left to the reader (who will probably use the defaults for their browser/ebook reader). This way everybody gets the fonts they're used to, which are the easiest fonts to read. I don't even know which exact font I'm looking at now, but I know that I don't allow web designers to change it.
It's what I've been using for months now (and I also block web fonts using Firefox Focus' extension in iOS/iPadOS Safari). And that's even though I'm a typography geek, and have bought fonts from Matthew Butterick (the author of the submitted article).
Looks weird for a day or two, after that you never miss web fonts.
Make sure to select a nice default font (for example, Verdana is nice, but I'm German, and Verdana does not have a closing quotation mark for German – it's another one than is in use in English).
My setting is Constantia as default font and serif, Segoe UI as sans-serif, and Consolas as monospace.
There’s a reason books and magazines are set in serif fonts: they are easier to read for long text paragraphs.
GUIs defaulted to sans serif fonts because displays didn’t have enough resolution to properly render serifs, but that’s mostly not the case anymore.
As an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/
Text-oriented software like Kindle and Medium default to serif fonts, but I don't know if they have any research to back that up. I suppose Amazon's usability people might have even bothered to look into that.
Of course a large part of this is simply that you read fastest what you read the most.
Mobile screens are obviously higher resolution so it's less clear cut, but sans serif are still a bit clearer in my view. I think the problem here is that the text is much smaller in physical size, so now the resolution of the human eye has come into play.
Interesting - I wasn't aware "resolution" was ever used this way. PPI (pixels per inch) and "pixel density" are common terms for this now.
With digital sensors and screens you can pretty much just calculate it directly since you can't resolve detail below the pixel level. But, note that moire can eliminate fine detail well above pixel level if not controlled.
Before that, there were standard targets with fine lines in tight tapering patterns. Folks would take a picture of the target with a particular lens and film, and then count the smallest line pairs they could make out before the taper disappeared into an undifferentiated blur. By varying lenses and films, they could compare resolution. Example:
https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2014/12/36-megapixels-vs-6x7-v...
Example/demo: https://input.fontbureau.com/preview/?size=14&language=xml&t...
Of course these don't all want the same sort of treatment, but they have some features in common: you're not going to be reading a lot of whatever-it-is at one go, and there probably aren't going to be multiple lines of text. So you don't care so much about things like how comfortable it is to read in bulk or whether blocks of text look good in overall shape/density, and being quirky or distractingly eye-catching might be a feature rather than a bug.
They are also important to the built environment - in Lisbon, Portugal where I now live, all the signage I see out and about is sans-serif, possibly the same font, and quite likely by the same handful of design agencies. I am genuinely feeling oppressed by sans-serif!! I long for serif, or indeed anything to indicate individuality and self expression (the graffiti is sometimes really good though).
I fully understand you, so just a few examples of the opposite of what you describe:
https://www.alamy.com/old-and-new-street-signs-with-blacklet...
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-paris-july-14-art-nouveau-...
Lyon Text: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/lyon_text
Blanco: https://www.fostertype.com/retail-type/blanco
Bridge Text: https://www.typemates.com/fonts/bridge-text
Arnhem: https://www.typeby.com/fonts/arnhem
Heldane: https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/heldane-text/
Ivar Text: https://lettersfromsweden.se/font/ivar-text/
Gliko Modern: http://r-typography.com/19_gliko-modern/
Rialto Piccolo: https://fontstand.com/fonts/rialto-piccolo-df
The others I find a bit too "designed" to be used as straight substitutes. Their design is quite striking, and risks distracting from the message in long paragraph text. Particularly Gliko, which is beautiful for titling but I can't imagine reading more than a few sentences of it.
I'm personally quite partial to the Adobe fonts for book text:
* Adobe Garamond https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-garamond#fonts-section
* Adobe Caslon https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-caslon#fonts-section
* And to some degree, even Minion https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/minion
Quick followup to share: https://typefoundry.directory
Readable and aesthetically pleasing, what's the general opinion on these default fonts in the typography world?
Roboto is (or: has become, its beginnings were somewhat rough) a great screen font, but for printed applications, it tends to look a little dull. This has to do with ubiquity, but also with the simplicity that is inherent to most screen fonts.
For a sans serif, default font, I like Palatino. Classic, nice open counters.
I suggest that on any occasion when you're inclined to use Palatino for substantial quantities of text (as opposed to titles, posters, book covers, etc.) you would do better to use Aldus instead.
(Aldus is a companion face to Palatino; Zapf's intention was that Palatino is for "display" use -- titles, posters, etc. -- and Aldus is for body-text.)
Look how many posts here use emotionally charged words like "unreadable", "love", "hate", "loathe", "abomination", etc.
I have a hard time quantifying why, but they’re much easier on the eyes.
Not a shameless plug I swear but we converted DejaVu Serif to a web font and used it here, if you want to see it “in action:” https://www.obsessivefacts.com/memespeech
Linux Libertine O is a better font in every way. If you really feel like you need a sans, Biolinum is pleasing.
I can see Times New Roman being the choice of no choice - when you don't think about it, you get that.
Reading this inspired me to think that I should search for an article like, "best fonts for people who don't know anything except Google Fonts" (I searched Google, wasn't very illuminating).
I don't know much more than Comic Sans bad, Helvetica good, Times New Roman meh. But, I'm learning.
Luckily I can usually arrange for that.
(But in any case, the standard Computer Modern Roman is not my cup of tea. I like more rounded fonts, but its serifs are too strong and dominate the shape.)
Times Roman is just another example of the defaults becoming the standard and we've all been trained to know the defaults serve hardly anyone yet we keep hammering away at them relentlessly as if they'll give us anything but default outcomes
There is some objectiveness to this subject but damned little and 99% of the comments are opinion. As a developer of many years, I've learned to just skip over any post that uses any form of the 'readability' adjective. It's totally subjective, and the poster more often than not will have a religious fervor about their opinion.
For a lot of us fonts were a key selling point of early computing and there's a story about Steve Jobs taking in design courses in fonts as an inspiration for the design of the Mac operating system.
The whole concept of fonts on the machine is another example of the message in the new medium essentially encapsulating the old.
Fonts are an important tradition going back to the printing press and we are rightfully protective of them.
Apparently the "rule" is that the lowercase alphabet should take up about 13 em of space.
From this image [2], you can see that Nimbus Roman No9 (which is a Times New Roman clone) is a little bit narrower than that. It would be interesting to see what the lowercase alphabet width is of the fonts proposed in the OP. Especially since the author noted that one of the criticisms of Times New Roman is that it's "too narrow".
For instance, I need a good 'editor' font which is both monospace and supports combining diacritics well, for writing papers in LaTeX in Emacs.
And I need good 'display' fonts for the PDF output of those LaTeX documents, which also of course have to support a wide range of combining diacritics well.
For both use cases, there is a surprisingly small range of choices given the full set of constraints.
[Details here: https://babbagefiles.xyz/beautiful-and-free-typefaces/ ]
Second, Plantin is not a "Times alternative," it is a variation on Bembo. Bembo is the opposite of Times ... it is e x p a n s i v e. It's like suggesting black as an alternative to white.
Third, I think the best alternative is actually NYT Imperial.
Plantin was released about 15 years before Bembo.
It screams apathy to me because it has been the "default" for a long time and if among the thousands of excellent fonts out there you pick the default, it feels very much apathetic. It makes a piece of work look like a high school essay.
The author never considers the fact that a writer may simply like the way Times New Roman looks. There's nothing wrong with liking things that are popular or the default choice.
Firefox on Android refuses to use the fonts I have designated in about:config, so HN remains depressingly sans.
Holy frig, Monotype vs. Linotype flamewar anyone?