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Comment by fotta | Hacker News Reader

>> So you paid approx $5* per content page for one of the most boring readings in your entire life, just for the lulz?

> I paid approximately five U. S. dollars per content page for one of the most boring readings in my entire life, just for the lulz.

> Recall that I did not claim to have made a reasonable financial decision. I did not, in fact, make a reasonable (or even defensible) financial decision. This is my way of coping with buyer's regret.

Hahahaha this was my favorite part.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_is...

edit:

> From what I can tell, they were written with Microsoft Word going by the line breaking and the use of Cambria as font. I don't think I could call it aesthetically pleasing without being insincere, however. Too much is wrong in terms of what I consider to be good typography (which mostly aligns with Butterick's Practical Typography).

At least it's not Arial?

View on HN

What's wrong with Arial?

I should be more aware of typography stuff, but which font (and why) would you use instead of Arial for, say, the Headings and normal paragraph in a technical report?

Essentially, the argument made by Butterick and others is that choosing Arial as a font is not a choice but indicates the absence of a choice, since it is a system font. [1] At the very end of that page he writes a few paragraphs exactly why he dislikes Arial.

Regarding alternatives: "[...] Arial is permanently associated with the work of people who will never care about typography. You’re not one of those people. So use Avenir. Use Franklin Gothic. Use Gill Sans. Use one of the fonts listed in Helvetica and Arial alternatives [2]. Or use something completely different. But don’t use Arial. It’s the sans serif of last resort."

[1] https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html

[2] https://practicaltypography.com/helvetica-and-arial-alternat...

COMIC SANS FOREVER!!!

I am selling an NFT of this comment in comic sans. Interested buyers, my email is in bio

Shut up and take my money

Arial IS Helvetica, just made for the screen by Microsoft. It is not optimized for print.

Arial is a knock-off of Helvetica with some minor design changes that are not related to screen vs print. If it isn’t “optimized for print”, then Helvetica isn’t either.

You’re right, my memory was wrong. It is a clone with the same metrics so layout wouldn’t change if you picked one versus the other. Microsoft paid monotype to port it to TrueType in 1990 which I believe was optimized for the screen. My memory of that is from the Helvetica documentary I watched maybe 10 years ago, so the specifics are hazy.

Honestly I think it's a matter of personal preference. I would write a technical report in a serifed font. I'm used to reading (La)TeX typeset reports like in academia so that's what I would use to write one. Sans serifed fonts look too casual (for lack of a better term?) for me in a technical report, not to mention the potential for ambiguity (l or I?) in sans serifed fonts.

By the way: If you are looking for relatives of typical LaTeX serif fonts such as Latin Modern, Computer Modern and friends, the keyword is "Century", e.g. Century Schoolbook. The latter is associated with documents produced by the US Supreme Court.

PS: Since I'm already citing Butterick in a sibling comment, I'm going to add another link here: https://practicaltypography.com/century-schoolbook-alternati...

> (l or I?)

I should point out that at least on my machine (latest macOS Safari), HN is rendered in a sans-serif font and shows them differently—the capital I has bars on the top and bottom. But, obviously, there are absolutely sans-serif fonts that do have this problem, Helveticarial among them.

I do not know much about typography but when I wrote my first LaTeX document, I found d it awful.

And then I realised that it is much easier to my eyes than other documents and I cold not unsee it.

I still think that the default font is ugly, but when you have a longer document you cannot go wrong with LaTeX.

When you compare the result with the same doc, but written in Arial, it is painful. The Arial document is really more difficult to read.

I think that this is Knuth who said that a document is meant to be read, and not as an art display.

Had to google what is the default font for LaTeX. Ah, this one? Right that does look familiar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern

And the font itself was created by Knuth? Did Knuth invent like everything?

Not just the font, the typesetting system behind it. All for his book!

I find it interesting how far back you can trace back the dislike of Computer Modern and typefaces like it. Its appearance has been considered outdated for nearly a century: Times New Roman replaced the Times of London's 'Modern' typeface in 1932. Typefaces made in the 1700s (Baskerville, for instance) look more modern to our eyes than Computer Modern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...

Arial is basically a ripoff of Helvetica, except pretty much everything it changes to separate itself makes the font worse. Using it screams “I used Google Docs to make this and I don’t care about typography”.

Helvetica's terminal strokes are either horizontally or vertically cut, while those of Arial are slightly angled.

Yes, that’s a big part of it, but in general it’s just a bunch of tweaks that make it look sloppier (the changes to R and G particularly annoy me). It really is an off-brand Helvetica in pretty much every sense.

Checking a few recent ISO standards on my local machine they use Cambria too.

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