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Comment by nilliams | Hacker News Reader

Always surprised when I see comments like this. I have the opposite view. The font size of both the OP site (and Medium) is perfect for me and I wish more sites would depart from the web's 'tiny text' mistakes of the past.

I find a website with 'old-fashioned' 12px or lower text is like me holding my iPhone at arm's length. Don't get it.

Curious as to your monitor size/res and whether you use the computer leaning forwards/backwards. I'm a 28yr old with good eyesight, I lean back in my chair.

Also wonder if a lot of hackers are biased towards small text because they're used to their IDEs/terminals which default to pretty tiny fonts.

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I use a 24" 1920x1200 monitor, nothing special, and it's about 50cm from my eyes. I'm in my 40s, so anything real close (< 25cm) is hard to read without reading glasses, but otherwise my eyesight is fine.

Don't know about 'hacker bias', but yes, I'm a dev that's grown up on xterms (on huge monitors), and use IDE's fullscreen at fontsizes a lot smaller than those of a medium blog (now _that_ would be a waste of screen space ;))

I see your point, but imho font sizes like OPs feel like a large print edition book held about a foot in front of my face. I guess it's mostly a matter of taste.

I'm not advocating the re-emergence of 12px text but the body text for Silvrback is 22px with 1.5 line-height. Medium is 1.45 and I believe 1.2 is normal. I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

>> I believe 1.2 is normal

It's the default in browsers and what the 'normal' keyword means yes, but I don't think it's a good default, any more than the default font-size is. I think 1.5 is a pretty common recommendation in the world of typography. I don't really have any good references to back that up, but if you Google '1.5 line height best practice' there's some reading to be had (realise that's a highly scientific approach)!

>> I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

Is that a problem? Perhaps they got it right with children's books. :) Is it comfortable on your eyes?

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