
When Fonts Fight, Times New Roman Conquers - sohkamyung
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/29/when-fonts-fight-times-new-roman-conquers
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cue_the_strings
ITT: nobody takes readability into consideration + default Windows, Mac,
Office fonts

Times has some objective merits, bland and ugly as it is. It is somewhat
readable on screen due to hinting. It's available in Office and used to be the
default, and many people won't even look for other Office fonts. If they did,
they'd find that Georgia rules the 'works on any resolution + paper' category.
Another (non-Office) solution is FOSS favorite Bitstream Charter (I suggest a
variant called XCharter for better Unicode coverage). Both Georgia and Charter
were designed by Matthew Carter.

If you have a high-dpi screen and a 1200dpi printer, you may as well use
Garamond. Minion (or FOSS-licenced Cochineal) are a bit plainer. Linux
Libertine is quite nice. If I wrote in a WYSIWYG editor, I'd probably still
use Charter, because it's even simpler and cleaner, and print something else.
These 'nice' serifs may provide some inspiration with their sheer beauty, but
I find looking at them on a screen tiring and prefer the simplicity of
Charter.

When it comes to sans-serifs, fortunately Arial isn't on the list. Both Arial
and Helvetica are shitty choices for copy, Univers being just slightly better
(wider spaced and easier to read) but still shit. Even Calibri reads
significantly easier than all of them neo-grotesques.

Frutiger (and its near-clone Myriad) reads much easier on screen and in print.
Syntax looks stylish on paper but crappy on screen, and same can be said of FF
Meta (I blame the angled terminals on some letters). Fira Sans (Meta derivate)
looks great on screen and on paper. If i had to use a sans-serif in a WYSIWYG
editor, I'd pick Fira or Frutiger.

However, since I only write LaTeX and (Pandoc) Markdown (both in Vim), I write
in Terminus or Inconsolata LGC, depending on screen resolution.

