The backlash against the world's most hated font may be ending | Hacker News Reader

The backlash against the world's most hated font may be ending

theatlantic.com

30 pointsfortran7754 comments

Someone made a monospaced version of Comic Sans, and it's ... not terrible?

https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/

There’s also Comic Code, which is a new font drawn in the same style. https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

This one is much better than the original: the 'a' is drawn properly, instead of like an 'o' with a tiny tail that's easy to miss.

Apart from esthetic considerations which are more or less personal taste Comic Sans is very readable.

Things like wobly lines or non symmetric letters (p q) help readability a lot.

Many fonts for the dyslexic use similar styling techniques to avoid letters flipping for example.

Programmer fonts are usually made for readability and I would assume the same holds true there.

I recently switched to it for coding and surprisingly I love it. It's readability is very high.

seems like next logical step is to adapt this to .psf for a console font.

Better than a lot of “hip” fonts that I have seen recently.

As I noticed most Comic Sans haters actually don't hate Comic Sans. It is actually fun little font, with the only fault of becoming a boring cliche due to overuse. Most of the hate comes from frequent improper use - fun little fonts have their place, but not at a funeral for example.

Too many people let themselves follow in participating in prejudice, whether it’s against programming languages, and fonts.

Reading about it, Comic sans was a very different font at one time.

I see similar behaviour with pineapple on pizza, as well as nano. Easy targets make for almost pavlovian responses.

Nano is good! Pineapple on pizza is in some circumstances. You should try the potato pizza they serve at CERN

> fun little fonts have their place, but not at a funeral for example

And definitely not when you're announcing the world you just found evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-co...

Why not? This isn’t TED: the impressive stuff is the content, not the presentation.

(That’s referenced in the opening paragraph of the main article)

I actually think that’s the perfect time to use that font.

It’s a celebration font and breakthroughs in physics should be celebrated.

If you verified the existence of the Higgs Boson you should be entitled to use any font your heart desires.

Even Wingdings?

Especially Wingdings; it really conveys the effort that went into the research.

It was not in a scientific paper but in the presentation, were a legible letter, even seen from far in the conference room, is more important than anything.

Publishing important papers in Latin has also fallen out of favour.

It's a sort of shibboleth, a filter to separate the audience into two groups. do you care about the evidence of the higgs boson or do you care about the use of that infernal font.

Quite often people from the openbsd project will use the font in their presentations, to much the same effect. Which as a harmless sort of trolling, I find hilarious. They even went out of their way to encode it as the default font on their web server.

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.sbin/httpd/server_http.c?r...

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/httpd/...

There must be some kind of inside joke at CERN about this. I’ve sat through more than a few conference talks by CERN researchers (not even LHC affiliated) where Comic Sans was the default font on the presentation slides.

Comic sans was created due to the improper use of Times New Roman in Microsoft Bob’s speech balloons[1], but it turns out to be quite useful: the significant differences between the glyphs make it very dyslexic-friendly.

—--

[1] http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm

I'm not aware of any scientific research using Comic Sans itself, but a font designed specifically to aid dyslexics using the supposedly beneficial features found in Comic Sans failed to help:

"Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6

But it didn't do any harm either, so if you like Comic Sans you might as well stick with it.

Comic Sans is, at least in UK, commonly used in schools due to it being the only Windows native font that has letters drawn the way children are taught to write them in early school

Some GNU/Linux (libre games actually) have cursive fonts too.

Only just noticed, if you google "Comic Sans" the font changes.

Ha!

it also does it if you google "connare"

But not if you search comic sans mono -it's a very specific easteregg

Hating Comic Sans is a meme, and the hate will never end. People make hating it a facet of their personality, the same way hating pineapple on pizza is made into a core trait

Yeah, it's this tribal bandwagon mentality. People think that having strong opinions is a sign of intelligence, and it's quite safe to just adopt what other apparently smart people agree on. There's a lot of it in the tech world - PHP bad, bash good, MySQL bad, Postgres good. I adopted most of these views when I was young (~15 years ago) because older, more experienced people were saying those things.

I think you’re overestimating the seriousness of these statements of ‘hatred’. Isn’t it all a bit of a joke? I thought it was, anyway.

> People think that having strong opinions is a sign of intelligence

…which is very strange, because it seems quite clear that a hallmark of intelligence (or at least thoughtfulness) is the ability to sit on the fence and hold multiple — seemingly contradictory — opinions at once.

> I think you’re overestimating the seriousness of these statements of ‘hatred’. Isn’t it all a bit of a joke? I thought it was, anyway.

No, at least not exclusively.

> …which is very strange, because it seems quite clear that a hallmark of intelligence (or at least thoughtfulness) is the ability to sit on the fence and hold multiple — seemingly contradictory — opinions at once.

I think seeing the world as multi-faceted and multi-colored (as opposed to black & white) is a sign of thoughtfulness. Many of these "contradictions" will then dissolve in the air.

In a former HN post about Comic Sans, I linked a math seminar lecture that used a modified Comic Sans asking for the exact font and remarked that it looks very nice. The only response I got was one trashing me for insinuating a Comic Sans-derived font would look good, saying the presentation looked awful, and not answering my question about the font.

The only reason I hate Comic Sans is because I'm told to do so by the Internet.

The Internet hates Comic Sans because the font is neither tribal nor futuristic.

Might you have any links to extended explorations of a tribal/futuristic dichotomy?

[I guess I'm in today's 10k because I last saw it discussed in Pareto, The Mind and Society (1935): an english translation of a 1916 work, which would be slightly pre-internet]

Lagniappe: https://i.imgflip.com/97mu1r.jpg

Papyrus probably best captures that dichotomy >>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

Mystery solved! That secret Kiwi conspirator Kim Sinclair, having noticed that people tend to have either tribal, Baskerville, sentiments that cause them to invent rationalisations for following aggregates of existing practices, or futuristic, Microgramma, sentiments that cause them to invent rationalisations for trying combinations of novel practices, used his 2009 opportunity to nudge a global audience in the direction of balanced, Papyrus, sentiments, from which one may hope they derive more rational rationalisations.

</tinfoil>

My state-issued, official high school diploma is written in Comic Sans. I love it!

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.ht...

Comic Sans getting all this hate… Papyrus is feeling left out

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=8qENZvgeBrRdB-xp

Comic Sans is good for dyslexic people.

Please stop posting websites that show only half the article. Post a full article or none at all.

I only follow the Hacker News guidelines. (I see the whole article because I pay for it, but there are other ways.)

If you don't like the Hacker News guidelines about links to paywalled sites, you're welcome to try any of the other websites on the Internet.

I appreciate Comic Sans. It's fun and whimsical, in a sea of overly serious fonts.

Between serious and comical, there's Andika, which looks great.

Back when people only used fonts that were preinstalled, comic sans was the default whimsical choice. In certain environments it got old fast.

Comic Sans, JNCOs, and all kinds of bad styles are coming back in vogue.

I still have some vintage JNCOs. They make great gifts and are fun to bust out at the appropriate venues.

https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

Can we all at least agree to hate Arial?

I do not think I can agree to hate something, in particular in larger groups.

How virtuous you are.

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