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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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[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.

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.

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