More Formatting Issues (Font, Specifically)

The previous font was much more readable for me. The post text is ok, if not great. But all the small stuff (e.g., the Category, the instructions for posting comments) is virtually unreadable.

My previous comment is virtually unreadable, too. So I agree that this font is no good for comments.

No, it's terrible. In truth, the old font wasn't great, but this is utterly unreadable - the letters look far too crowded together.

I want to clarify - the comment font is terrible, but so is the text body.

okay, i'll change the comments font back to what it was .. incidentally, is there another font out there that you suggest that i use instead?

what's wrong with arial? Seriously, it's _the_ font for scientific publishing for a reason - its by far the most readable.

Arial exists solely because it was distributed with Microsoft Office. It is a dreadful font that lacks even the virtues of Helvetica, which it is a bad knockoff of.

See for a fun little "tutorial" on this.

It's the font used by most people simply because they don't know any better, and it's cheap.

Well, Helvetica is a very bad choice for long text, it's ok for things like figures (in fact it's the best font for that) and short comments.

Fonts for real text, particularly if it gets somewhat long, must be fonts with serifs (the small "tails" that help readers to join characters) so that your brain processes a word at a time and not a character at a time as it does with sans-serif fonts like helvetica. The test is trying to read a really long text with a sans-serif font, you get a headache. Scientific publishing, at least in the journals I write to, is generally a Times-Roman look alike.

garamond is in the same font family, and in fact, i listed "times new roman"and "times" as several of the default texts if garamond is unavailable. these were my first and second choices until i found that garamond could be used as a blog text.

I think the Garamond of the posts looks better in the larger size. (You did enlarge it, right?) It is a small font as it is, so there is no need to keep it small. I like it for its elegance and have used it for my offline writing for several years. I think it also brings the look of the posts closer to the look of printed matter because of the serifs.

I also don't think it is bad having a different font in the posts than in the sidebars since the sidebars then match the look of the scienceblogs template around it.

good eye! i did enlarge the font. it is 16 point now while photo captions are 14 point.

For screen use the only good choices, given that many screens are still pretty bad, are Georgia (serif) and Verdana (sans serif), despite the fact that they are a MSwindows thing.

I like Garamond for printed text but on screen that font is only nice at really big sizes. At the sizes used in computers there is really no difference in readibility between Georgia and Verdana, only after size 14 serif fonts start to improve reading velocity.

For the small sizes in the blog sidebar sans serif is really the best option. For text I don't like sans serif fonts (they lack the "professional" touch and are only good for titles) but there are some studies which have found that people do prefer sans serif fonts for on screen text, and older people seem to really fancy Verdana. So, how old are the three people that read your blog?

Well, I actually unchecked the box in the Firefox preferences, to force everything to be displayed in fonts of my choosing. I had to go back and change that, to see what you were talking about.

What is surprising to me -- judging from the comments -- is how much people think about this issue, and how strongly they feel about it.

Most often, I have everything displayed in Arial. I am fairly sure that personal preference has a lot to do with how readable a font seems to be. Not all brains are wired alike, so even if most people can read serif fonts more easily, that is not true for me.

I suggest that if anyone is having difficulty reading this -- or any other -- blog, consider changing the default fonts and sizes in your browser preferences.

The size can be changed on the fly. If you have a mouse wheel, hold down the control key and roll the mouse wheel up or down to change the text size. Otherwise, the control key and the plus and minus keys do the same thing. There is a reason that browsers have all those settings, and it is a good idea to fiddle with them to get the results that work best for you.

Fonts for real text, particularly if it gets somewhat long, must be fonts with serifs (the small "tails" that help readers to join characters) so that your brain processes a word at a time and not a character at a time as it does with sans-serif fonts like helvetica.

I've read that it's only true for printed material, and that on the computer screen it's easier to read sans-serif fonts than serif fonts.

Garamond is pretty in print (I use it myself) but not as good on-screen, and especially not in small sizes.

Sans-serif fonts are generally easier to read on screen.
There are fonts designed specifically for on-screen use - Verdana or Tahoma (both more elegant than Arial, IMO), or Georgia if you like serifs.

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/fonts/#screenfonts__50_134_05_02
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000449.html

i am surprised -- pleasantly so -- that so many other people are so passionate about font styles. i thought it was just a weird little quirk of mine. i love font styles because, when i was a wee one, i was quite the artist and routinely drew anything and everything that i ran across. one thing i drew was letters. i would draw letters freehand in various fonts for posters, so i have always been very interested in the nit-picky differences between font styles.

so you will be (somewhat) happier to see that i just changed the font to georgia. it's the other serif font that is popular on the internet. it's still 16 point.

i guess i will have to reserve garamond for the books that i write -- provided, of course, that i ever write anything worthy of the print media!

Looking good now!

I will take issue with the commenter who implied that the previous font was only hard to read on "bad" screens. Maybe it was easier to read on a top-of-the-line display, but plenty of very good screens had trouble with it too. :)

grrlscientist, you underestimate the nerdiness of your (three) readers. Of course we care about fonts (color schemes for the 8% of the male population having some sort of color viewing problem is also a nice subject). Someone commented about serifs being mostly adequate for printing. Well, that's true, monitors (the "bad" screens but also the good screen dlamming seems to have) are still too small to really allow for big font sizes and the small tails may be distracting, but at higher font sizes even you start having a gain in reading speed. For a work done on that:

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/3W/fontSR.htm

Leaving aside font issues, I find that I have to scroll down past all your sidebar ads to get to your substantive text.

Hi there,

Your biggest technical problem right now is that the blog isn't displaying properly in Internet Explorer (which, if my site is anything to go by, some 75% of your readers will use): all the text is way below the fold, over on the left, under the global stupidity system thing. Thought I should let you know... cheers, Stephen

Yes, I'm still having the problem Stepher Ayer mentioned.

If the formatting stays like this, the fraction of IE users who read it is likely to plummet. Most, not bothering to scroll about 3 miles down, will think this blog has turned into a big blank.

Same here with IE - text all the way at the bottom

do the ads in the right sidebar slide over into the text body a little bit? i don't think the picture size is it because i have posted pictures to other essays that also are also 500 pixels wide without any problems (specifically; the avian influenza entry, all of the Birds in the News, and the New Guinea birds stories, to name a few). one way to figure this out is to click on the "I and the Bird" entry .. is it also at the bottom? that picture is not 500 pixels wide, so it should appear at the top on all browsers as normal.

i have been messing with the coding for the template and a few modules and managed to screw up the formatting in the exact way you describe for all browsers by accidentally deleting a "< /div >" tag at the bottom of the free module. i added that tag back and the problem was resolved for all browsers except windoze-IE. it is possible (likely) that i deleted (or added) something else that is screwing up the formatting for IE, but since i am not an expert, i cannot say what it would be, and my behind-the-scenes experts are equally mystified. meanwhile, i am still trying to figure this out. .. ... grr.

I'm having the same problem with IE that the others have mentioned. It's been like this for several days, since you first mentioned you were changing the formatting.

The ads on the right side are outside of the text body in the gray area, so they don't seem to be causing the problem. Most likely you delete a span or table tag somewhere - and those can be a pain to find! Good luck, and keep up the good work - I really enjoy this blog.

In response to your (Hedwig's) question: yes, views fine with IE now.

Stephen; i am thrilled to know this! i dreamt the correction to make to my template code, you know, and awoke at 3am, hoping i could locate an active wireless connection so i could make the fix before i forgot the solution.

anyway, i think i am making progress in the school of geekdom!