

Ask HN: Why Verdana? - hmart

The HN font looks small and ugly in Linux because Verdana font is not installed by default. I had to install mscorefonts. Why don't use a responsive CSS font family adding sans-serif?
======
makecheck
I think the better question is, why specify fonts at all?

I set fonts in my browser. When browsing any site that simply _leaves fonts
alone_ , everything looks the way I want it to! When sites tinker with the
font used by _most_ text, it is unnecessarily hard to fix (e.g. my style sheet
has to list all kinds of HTML tags where text may appear and include lots of
"!important" flags).

I can understand setting a fancy font for the odd title or something, but _all
the text on the page_? Why?

For what it's worth, this is my entire override stylesheet for HN, including
some tweaks to the home page that I think make it substantially more readable.
I recommend trying it. :)

    
    
      html {
          overflow-y: scroll;
      }
      
      body, p, table, th, td, a, .comment {
          font-family: "Helvetica Neue" !important;
          font-size: normal;
          padding: 0.2em;
      }
      
      .subtext {
          width: 100%;
      
          padding-left: 40%;
      
          padding-bottom: 0.6em;
          border-bottom: solid #ccc 0.1em !important;
      }

~~~
fbuilesv
Because the default font for most browsers (Times [New Roman]) looks ugly and
the number of people who customizes their own styles is abysmally low.

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tux1968
Your fontconfig install should really take care of this for you locally
without HN needing to change anything. You shouldn't need to install
mscorefonts either since there are reasonable free alternatives.

~~~
aw34W
It is a valid point, though. Others have had the same issue. It would be
better to use families that worked in most major linux distros in the last few
years without tweaking.

Mentioned by daleharvey almost 2 years ago here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229637>

Related discussion from then: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229006>

~~~
tux1968
Totally agree that there isn't a good reason to specify Verdana instead of a
more universal font family. But even if you get HN to fix this up, there will
remain many other sites with similar odd choices.

So it's easier to insulate yourself from the issue instead, with a proper
fontconfig setup. I'd have thought most recent distro's come configured to
avoid this issue completely. If not, it's pretty simple to configure your
system to substitute a font of your choice in all these cases.

------
Todd
This is a pretty simple fix in CSS using font face fallbacks. Here's a typical
example:

    
    
      font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
    

Maybe pg or friends will update it.

~~~
wavephorm
Maybe take out the HTML Table tags too so the pages can be viewed properly on
mobile devices.

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DiabloD3
I've been using "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Verdana", Arial,
Helvetica, sans-serif as my list. Seems to do what I want.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Is that in order? I tend to use Helvetica first so Mac users don't have to
endure Arial, then I add , my fallback for Linux, then Arial, then whatever
crap your browser uses as a default (I assume it's crap but hope it isn't).

~~~
DiabloD3
In that order. I don't do Hel first because Linux historically has a broken
Hel. Mac users often have DejaVu, Bitstream Vera, or Verdana installed anyhow.

OSX users are such a small minority, its hard to find a way to please them
without making it worse for Windows and Linux.

That, and I've viewed my website in Safari on OSX, it looks correct (although,
like everything on OSX, it has hard to read fuzzy fonts).

~~~
cmontgomeryb
"OSX users are such a small minority, its hard to find a way to please them
without making it worse for Windows and Linux."

There are many more OSX users than Linux on the desktop.

<http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9>

<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp>

<http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201011-201111>

~~~
DiabloD3
Except I collect website stats on my sites. OSX users are the smallest
minority.

------
arundelo
My favorite thing about it is that uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" look
different (the former has serifs).

