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Comment by oofabz | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how the article praises large x-height and low-contrast strokes, yet it is written in Garamond, a font with small x-height and high-contrast strokes.

Personally I like small x-height and high-contrast strokes, so I find the article very readable. But I think fonts with these features require higher-DPI displays. Consider Computer Modern, which is beautiful on paper but unreadable at low resolution.

I wonder if the studies mentioned in the article took this into account. Were they testing readability on low-res screens, paper, or what? Would you get different results if you changed the medium?

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The article is talking typefaces for UIs, not for body copy.

A telephone book, a phone screen menu, a novel, and a traffic sign all have dramatically different constraints on legibility.

The article even talks about the difference between isolated words and longer sentences: https://viljamis.com/2016/typography-for-user-interfaces/#ho...

true, but the difference between a 1080p and retina displays are quite stark. as is the difference between LCD and eInk. that might change things?

Just a technicality, but a 1080p display can be considered 'retina' if the display is small enough or typically viewed from a far distance. The display on the iPhone 6 Plus is 1080p. It qualifies as a 'Retina display' because of its high pixel density and the typical viewing distance of 1 foot.

Retina is, at best, a standard of pixel density, in general it's just marketing.

Standard on phones yes, but the PC market has not yet caught up. A 1920x1080px monitor is still the baseline.

Because of battery life

GP was referring to Desktop screens, not laptops, I believe. Those are AC powered.

Indeed. The thing I find surprising about laptops that one has basically choice between a HiDPI screen, or a 1366x768 "Everything is blurry" screens.

Well it's talking about UI text not content copy.

> Computer Modern, is [...] unreadable at low resolution

I agree it's much worse at low resolution, but it is readable. How low do you have in mind?

Here it is at 10pt and you know it actually looks decent. Maybe bad font hinting in PDF viewers has biased me against Computer Modern.

https://frammish.org/cmu_serif-10pt.png

Computer Modern on modern displays looks very good (even plain ones, not just retina and such). It's totally possible to use these fonts for websites, for example.

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