Times New Roman. Just saying’

You want this? Where?

If you’re thinking of text for articles and comments read on. But we’re going to get deep into technical weeds and personal preference.

TNR is a serifed font. Serifs are the little “tails” on the edges of letters, mostly horizontal, that help a reader’s eye flow on from word to word. The original “Times” font comes from (if I remember correctly) the London Times newspaper over 100 years ago as a font designed to be read in narrow columns printed at fairly high resolution via hot lead type. And Times, TNR, and their various cousins all look nice when printed on paper at 300 dpi or greater these days. But even with it being very popular many people find it hard to read in wide paragraphs. And when displayed at 70 to 80 dpi on many display it can get even harder to read.

All of this leads to why one of the many reasons there are so many font choices these days. What is the audience? Newspaper printed format? Magazines with better paper and wider columns? Textbooks where you want things to flow but at a pace that is slow enough to encourage memory in the majority of people? (New Century Schoolbook was developed just for this application.) Note that while all of these are typically serifed, their use assumes a high quality printing method applied to paper so serifs can be used and help.

Then we have headings and such. Think chapter titles and newspaper headlines. You want someone reading these to notice them and pause long enough to decide to read the item under the headline. So serifs are usually not used for headlines and things like bold and italics and larger sizes are used. Again this is all applied to higher quality PRINTED information.

Now we come to these pesky computers. Until everyone has a display like those on the iPad v3 blindly applying “what works good for print” can make display reading hard. Light delicate tails off the end of the letter “a” becomes a fat dot. Or worse 2 dots of the same size. (There’s a lot of time in the font design world spend dealing with what do to in a font when what you want is 1 and 1/2 dots.) So on a computer display serifs tend to do the opposite of their intended effect of making reading flow. Except at larger sizes. So in for information intended for display on computers you wind up many times doing the opposite of what you would do for printed information. Skip the serifs on reading text and, to better visual differentiate them from text, use serifs on headlines and titles. Toss in personal preferences and it can get very hard to come up with a one font that everyone likes.

So we work hard at trying to come up with a compromised set of font choices that will appeal to the widest audience based on research I’ve done and read over the years and looking at things like background colors, font sizes, typical display sizes. (We get statistics on all the sizes of displays used to read the blog and what percentage of the reader ship have each. And can break it down day to day or year to year or most any number in the middle.) I have somewhat of an advantage in that I can look at the blog on displays ranging from phone sizes to 22″ every day. Most days I use 4 different display sizes. Some days a dozen or more. Oh, yes. We also get to deal with limits on what we can assume in on most computers. So we get to specify a list of fonts for each usage point. Which is why someone might see courier on an old Windows XP computer, Monaco on an older Mac, and Andale Mono on a newer computer.

So yes I know fonts are not perfect but we are tweaking them as we go along trying to strike a balance between being pretty on a “great” display and being easily reading by the majority on displays typically used by the readers of this blog. And since we just converted to a new “theme” (how you customize the look of a WordPress blog) we’re getting to (having to) start from 0 and adjust everything on the fly so to speak. (I just made an adjustment while typing this comment.)

Thank you for your patience and understanding that, as someone wiser than me said, “We are all UNIQUELY and wonderfully made.” And thus one size never seems to fit all.

For those really curious here are the screen resolutions ranked by visits for the last three months.

1. 1280×800 13.37%
2. 1366×768 11.46%
3. 1024×768 8.32%
4. 1440×900 7.73%
5. 768×1024 7.09%
6. 320×480 7.03%
7. 1280×1024 5.96%
8. 1920×1080 5.15%
9. 1600×900 4.10%
10. 1680×1050 3.95%
11. 1920×1200 2.58%
12. 1024×600 1.50%
13. 1280×720 1.36%
14. 1093×614 1.01%

The rest are below 1%.

@ Bridget (formerly Bridget2):

Blogroll and latest comment are there. Blogroll is after “The Basics”. Latest comments are on the right.

Above both of these columns are search, categories, and archives With the later two as a popup. What do you see?

Yes. This new theme has a lot of separate options (or setting I can’t really change) for mobile devices. I have not dug very deep into them yet. But one thing the blog tries to do now is notice if you are on a mobile device and simplify the display so it fits better. We will be working more on mobile as we go along.

Bridget wrote:

Feel free to email me if you want me to comment on mobile app issues.

I have an iPhone plus a lot of other choices to use for testing. We’re just making a priority of laptops and larger first. Plus hopefully more than 4 hours sleep a night this week. 🙂

A. Amos Love wrote:

Don’t know how it works – but…

Some blogs just have a little box to check if you want to receive followup comments
on that particular thread right by the “Post a Comment” box that reads…

“Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”

That IS an option. But it creates more work behind the scenes for us. At times a lot more as people make comment #3 on a hot topic then 400 comments later are yelling at us to “TURN IT OFF”. 🙂

Plus sometimes people who sign up for the emails get tired of them and tell their ISP we are SPAMing them and suddenly AOL or Time Warner blocks ALL emails from TWW. 🙁