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Ugh. This is an outdated article. Modern day displays are crisp enough to render sophisticated serif typefaces. For example, this book [1] on the web uses EB G

Ugh. This is an outdated article. Modern day displays are crisp enough to render sophisticated serif typefaces. For example, this book [1] on the web uses EB Garamond [2] to present the content: [1] https://bubblin.io/book/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bidyananda-giriji-maharaj/1 https://bubblin.io/book/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bi... [2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond [3] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant+Garamond https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant+Garamond

twobitshifter 5y ago
Unrelated, but flipping through that book is one of the few times I wished for a UI that did not keep pages in your your history. Flip through a few pages and try to click back.
- marvindanig 5y ago
  hmm. It magically becomes very useful if you were to actually read the book and not just flip through capriciously.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    That may be, I was just trying to get to a page with the font which needed a lot of flipping. If the book were opened in a new tab, I don’t think I’d have the same complaint.
    - marvindanig 5y ago
      Hmm. That's a solid point. Thank you! I should have shared the Cover [1] instead of the Book itself. Then it'd have opened on a new tab. [1] https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bidyananda-giriji-maharaj#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-b...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Typical practice has been to offer long-form content broken by section (typically chapter), with internal section links for finer references. This balances the history-pollution, pagination, and link-based reference needs. (There's been some playing with the notion of linking content within web pages by the specific text or string. such as, say, "There's been some playing". With word-based ngrams, 4--5 word sequences are strongly likely to be unique within a work, save for cliched phrases or idioms.)
    - marvindanig 5y ago
      Agreed. But more typical is publishing the on dead-tree pulp. I am aware about the views held by the older generation of developers on this topic; most of those unix heads (especially on this forum) are desktop thinkers and end up buying physical books on latest software themselves. ;-)
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        And some have turned to e-ink book readers with high DPI and portrait-mode presentation. With paginated navigation. On desktop, scrolling using page-oriented controls (spacebar or page-up / page-down) isn't a terrible online reading experience. The fact that paper-oriented presentation remains so abysmally poor at less than ~4k retina display resolution remains a real friction for reading. On mobile devices, touch + scroll itself becomes quite bad. High-speed emissive displays at least handle the refresh requirements, but make precise navigation all but impossible. E-ink, portrait mode, and pagination, aren't quite the paper experience, but are reasonably close. The variant I mentioned in my earlier comment works reasonably well for destkop reading. I find that scrolling through up to about 20--30 pages worth of printed material without a break is tolerable. Beyond that, the scrolling (and imprecision of placement) becomes tedious. (I've, um ... accidentally ... created book-length HTML documents and actually read them. It's doable, but it's far from the ideal.)
        marvindanig 5y ago
        Absolutely! Ha, yes! Scrolling vertically is orthogonal to the reading direction. This makes us lose track of scanning head (leading word/sentence) on the content easily. Goes against the grain of our saccadic perception kinda of. A horizontal flipping transition however, with line-tracking over the text (orphan/widow handling) is the most comfortable book reading experience since it is only intermittently animating—when moving forward to the next page, and connects with the forward flow of storytelling along a groove that our eyes can keep track of. IMO, page flipping is THE native control of a book and it cannot be dropped off the standards just like that! I recently read a paper on why an iridescent screen of an iPad or a smartphone is better for the human eyes than a reflective surface of electronic paper like E-ink. Flux of light. Intensity or flux is the only parameter that matters to the health of our eyes, and that’s something one could control only with an IPS panel type of screen. Since an e-ink relies on ambient lighting fwiw, low illumination can easily strain the reader’s pupillary muscles and degrade sight sooner.
- leephillips 5y ago
  But that’s literally what the history is supposed to be. It’s not as if this a a web app that stores your mouse movements or something in your history.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    It's equivalent to adding pages to the history every time you scroll.
    - marvindanig 5y ago
      That's false equivalency. Equating a book to a single long page is just plain wrong. Long-form has always required pagination. This was true even with physical scrolls back in the day. If you inspect the book that is linked above it is literally made up of several hundred webpages. So the reader is effectively transitioning from one webpage to another. And the history api is meant exactly for this use case! Edit: Here's the definition. A Superbook [1] is a stack of simple webpages, just like a book. [1] https://bubblin.io/docs/concept https://bubblin.io/docs/concept
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        Except those web pages are broken into pages at arbitrary locations, rather than by chapter or topic like most web sites are, and each page is only one screen tall. A better analogy would be adding a history entry every time I press PageUp or PageDown: it would clutter up the history so much as to make it useless. Another way to think of it is that a web page is one document, and so is a book. The history stack is a list of visited documents. If the book should be treated as a collection of documents, then it should be structured that way. I don't think there's a good solution to online books that are presented like that, but I like how the Kindle app works: following a link or jumping ahead in the book adds a history entry (with the in-app back button), but just turning the page doesn't.
        marvindanig 5y ago
asiachick 5y ago
Is it possible you're under estimating the number of lo-dpi devices? AFAIK most windows laptops are still lo-dpi
- marvindanig 5y ago
  Likely! The data that I relied on for my research last year covered the North American and European regions and that automatically skews in favor of modern displays. Thankfully with Windows too, the lo-dpi market is shrinking. But I'm not sure for what percentage of folks this article would still hold its value until a few more years.
spystath 5y ago
I don't think high-DPI screens are as commonplace as it is continuously being repeated here. The only relatively common high-DPI screens are on the macbooks and higher end 13/14" laptops (250-300 ppi). If you move away from laptops and on desktop-sized screens (25-27") ppi quickly plummets. A common market monitor size/resolution combination is 27" at 4k resolution. This is roughly 160 ppi, although better than 1080p ~100 ppi screens is still nowhere near the pixel density of a macbook. So even on 4k screens the legibility of a heavily-serifed font such as Garamond is questioned. There is probably ONE desktop monitor with >250 ppi I can readily find* (Dell UP3218K) and that's almost $4k !! I'd say the author's argument still stands for anyone not on a ~$≥1.5k laptop. It's the same story as "we don't need subpixel antialiasing any more". Yes it's an ugly hack and yes you definitely don't need it on 300 ppi screen. Fonts are still going to look fuzzy on anything else. [*] In the UK: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=768004320,576002160,512002880,512002160,512001440,409602160,384002160&sort=price&page=1 https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=768004320,57...
- marvindanig 5y ago
  You're limiting the scope of ppi to desktops only? Almost ~80% of the web is on mobile [1][2][3]. Close to 56% people online are "mobile only", which means that they will never look at anything other than a hdpi screen in their lifetime. [1] https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/mobile-percentage-of-traffic/ https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/mobile-percentage-of-traffi... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-... [3] https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/ https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-market...
  - spystath 5y ago
    It's true, I haven't factored in smartphones. That still doesn't invalidate the argument. I still believe it's quite narrow-minded to choose typefaces based on a 270+ ppi device. It still excludes a quite significant amount of users, and probably most desktop users.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> For example, this book [1] on the web uses EB Garamond [2] to present the content: It does, but I wouldn’t agree that that is a good choice (though the body font is far from the worst typographic choice in that work.)

twobitshifter 5y ago

Unrelated, but flipping through that book is one of the few times I wished for a UI that did not keep pages in your your history. Flip through a few pages and try to click back.

marvindanig 5y ago
hmm. It magically becomes very useful if you were to actually read the book and not just flip through capriciously.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  That may be, I was just trying to get to a page with the font which needed a lot of flipping. If the book were opened in a new tab, I don’t think I’d have the same complaint.
  - marvindanig 5y ago
    Hmm. That's a solid point. Thank you! I should have shared the Cover [1] instead of the Book itself. Then it'd have opened on a new tab. [1] https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bidyananda-giriji-maharaj#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-b...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Typical practice has been to offer long-form content broken by section (typically chapter), with internal section links for finer references. This balances the history-pollution, pagination, and link-based reference needs. (There's been some playing with the notion of linking content within web pages by the specific text or string. such as, say, "There's been some playing". With word-based ngrams, 4--5 word sequences are strongly likely to be unique within a work, save for cliched phrases or idioms.)
  - marvindanig 5y ago
    Agreed. But more typical is publishing the on dead-tree pulp. I am aware about the views held by the older generation of developers on this topic; most of those unix heads (especially on this forum) are desktop thinkers and end up buying physical books on latest software themselves. ;-)
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      And some have turned to e-ink book readers with high DPI and portrait-mode presentation. With paginated navigation. On desktop, scrolling using page-oriented controls (spacebar or page-up / page-down) isn't a terrible online reading experience. The fact that paper-oriented presentation remains so abysmally poor at less than ~4k retina display resolution remains a real friction for reading. On mobile devices, touch + scroll itself becomes quite bad. High-speed emissive displays at least handle the refresh requirements, but make precise navigation all but impossible. E-ink, portrait mode, and pagination, aren't quite the paper experience, but are reasonably close. The variant I mentioned in my earlier comment works reasonably well for destkop reading. I find that scrolling through up to about 20--30 pages worth of printed material without a break is tolerable. Beyond that, the scrolling (and imprecision of placement) becomes tedious. (I've, um ... accidentally ... created book-length HTML documents and actually read them. It's doable, but it's far from the ideal.)
      - marvindanig 5y ago
        Absolutely! Ha, yes! Scrolling vertically is orthogonal to the reading direction. This makes us lose track of scanning head (leading word/sentence) on the content easily. Goes against the grain of our saccadic perception kinda of. A horizontal flipping transition however, with line-tracking over the text (orphan/widow handling) is the most comfortable book reading experience since it is only intermittently animating—when moving forward to the next page, and connects with the forward flow of storytelling along a groove that our eyes can keep track of. IMO, page flipping is THE native control of a book and it cannot be dropped off the standards just like that! I recently read a paper on why an iridescent screen of an iPad or a smartphone is better for the human eyes than a reflective surface of electronic paper like E-ink. Flux of light. Intensity or flux is the only parameter that matters to the health of our eyes, and that’s something one could control only with an IPS panel type of screen. Since an e-ink relies on ambient lighting fwiw, low illumination can easily strain the reader’s pupillary muscles and degrade sight sooner.
leephillips 5y ago
But that’s literally what the history is supposed to be. It’s not as if this a a web app that stores your mouse movements or something in your history.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  It's equivalent to adding pages to the history every time you scroll.
  - marvindanig 5y ago
    That's false equivalency. Equating a book to a single long page is just plain wrong. Long-form has always required pagination. This was true even with physical scrolls back in the day. If you inspect the book that is linked above it is literally made up of several hundred webpages. So the reader is effectively transitioning from one webpage to another. And the history api is meant exactly for this use case! Edit: Here's the definition. A Superbook [1] is a stack of simple webpages, just like a book. [1] https://bubblin.io/docs/concept https://bubblin.io/docs/concept
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Except those web pages are broken into pages at arbitrary locations, rather than by chapter or topic like most web sites are, and each page is only one screen tall. A better analogy would be adding a history entry every time I press PageUp or PageDown: it would clutter up the history so much as to make it useless. Another way to think of it is that a web page is one document, and so is a book. The history stack is a list of visited documents. If the book should be treated as a collection of documents, then it should be structured that way. I don't think there's a good solution to online books that are presented like that, but I like how the Kindle app works: following a link or jumping ahead in the book adds a history entry (with the in-app back button), but just turning the page doesn't.
      - marvindanig 5y ago

asiachick 5y ago

Is it possible you're under estimating the number of lo-dpi devices? AFAIK most windows laptops are still lo-dpi

marvindanig 5y ago
Likely! The data that I relied on for my research last year covered the North American and European regions and that automatically skews in favor of modern displays. Thankfully with Windows too, the lo-dpi market is shrinking. But I'm not sure for what percentage of folks this article would still hold its value until a few more years.

spystath 5y ago

I don't think high-DPI screens are as commonplace as it is continuously being repeated here. The only relatively common high-DPI screens are on the macbooks and higher end 13/14" laptops (250-300 ppi). If you move away from laptops and on desktop-sized screens (25-27") ppi quickly plummets. A common market monitor size/resolution combination is 27" at 4k resolution. This is roughly 160 ppi, although better than 1080p ~100 ppi screens is still nowhere near the pixel density of a macbook. So even on 4k screens the legibility of a heavily-serifed font such as Garamond is questioned. There is probably ONE desktop monitor with >250 ppi I can readily find* (Dell UP3218K) and that's almost $4k !! I'd say the author's argument still stands for anyone not on a ~$≥1.5k laptop. It's the same story as "we don't need subpixel antialiasing any more". Yes it's an ugly hack and yes you definitely don't need it on 300 ppi screen. Fonts are still going to look fuzzy on anything else. [*] In the UK: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=768004320,576002160,512002880,512002160,512001440,409602160,384002160&sort=price&page=1 https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=768004320,57...

marvindanig 5y ago
You're limiting the scope of ppi to desktops only? Almost ~80% of the web is on mobile [1][2][3]. Close to 56% people online are "mobile only", which means that they will never look at anything other than a hdpi screen in their lifetime. [1] https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/mobile-percentage-of-traffic/ https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/mobile-percentage-of-traffi... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-... [3] https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/ https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-market...
- spystath 5y ago
  It's true, I haven't factored in smartphones. That still doesn't invalidate the argument. I still believe it's quite narrow-minded to choose typefaces based on a 270+ ppi device. It still excludes a quite significant amount of users, and probably most desktop users.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> For example, this book [1] on the web uses EB Garamond [2] to present the content: It does, but I wouldn’t agree that that is a good choice (though the body font is far from the worst typographic choice in that work.)