Comic Sans, Font of Ill Will 503
Kelson writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Vincent Connare, designer of the web's most-hated font, Comic Sans. Not surprisingly, the font's origins go back to Microsoft Bob, where he saw a talking dog speaking in Times New Roman. Connare pulled out Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns for reference, and created the comic book-style font over the next week. 'Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer. ... The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web."
Oblig. Achewood (Score:3, Informative)
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007 [achewood.com]
Re:He got something right... (Score:2, Informative)
Taste the curb (Score:5, Informative)
From the WSJ article: "An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare." That would be this. [achewood.com]
Hypocrites (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't take advice on good taste from them.
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure you are looking at Comic Sans on an Apple system and not Chalkboard? The two fonts are similar, but Chalkboard has nicer-looking letter shapes. The kerning may be slightly different between OS X and Windows, and OS X will place the font glyphs correctly and antialias, while Windows will round the locations off to the nearest pixel, which can cause Windows displays to appear to have incorrect kerning (it's a trade - Windows gives you better-looking characters in exchange for worse-looking words, OS X is the opposite way around).
On Ubuntu, you are seeing font substitution. A half-decent font rendering system will substitute a 'similar' font (where the value of 'similar' varies based on who wrote the substitution algorithm) when the requested font is not found. It seems that you do not have several of the fonts you are attempting to display installed, and so their outlines are being provided by a completely different font. This is a configuration issue.
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:5, Informative)
What, you need a citation for the jargon file? Hand in your geek card, and go back to whatever pop culture meme site you came from.
Re:Font-Snob (Score:2, Informative)
That's not a word, it's a compound noun/adjective
Fontsnob WOULD be a word.
Fontsnob, Copyright 2009 Jack Cullen :-P
http://jackcullen.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Re:Font-Snob (Score:4, Informative)
It's why I can no longer look at non anti-aliased fonts outside the terminal.
The reason you make an exception for the terminal is likely due to bitmap fonts being used in the terminal. In most situations, an unscaled bitmap font will look better than a vector font. They were used a lot in early X apps, but are now discouraged because they lack resolution-independence (or, rather, look hideous when you scale them to compensate for a different resolution).
Helvetica (Score:4, Informative)
I never thought a font could be so interesting...
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent down.
The parent is so wrong, it's scary. One word, dude: Baudot. It's the predecessor to ASCII and was used to send telegrams by wire and wireless. Another word: teletype. That's where "TTY" comes from. The first computer user interface equipment was converted teletype equipment. Third word: descenders. The first teletype printers used a strip of paper, "ticker tape," to print on. Capital letters in Roman based character sets have no descenders (if Q is not stylized.) Capitals represented the most efficient use of the paper, and having only one case of characters made Baudot smaller-- fewer bits per character, fewer chances for error making the text illegible (until FEC and other transmission strategies came along.)
And who first realized that all caps make for efficiency? Stone masons. Ever seen a Greco-Roman building?
Re:Remember when HTML had fonts? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:3, Informative)
And who first realized that all caps make for efficiency? Stone masons. Ever seen a Greco-Roman building?
There was no lowercase Latin or Greek letters at all in Antiquity - it is a much later invention. So it was not a matter of efficiency back then.
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:3, Informative)
A shame they didn't type
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
before they generated that image.
Re:Similar to Windows hate? (Score:4, Informative)