5 ms·

Substitute Web Fonts with StopTheMadness

31 points by alsetmusic 4y ago

throwaway294566 4y ago
Substituting Arial by Helvetica is the ultimate expression of pointless counterproductive font snobbery. If you really want to do the world some good, substitute by something that a) isn't boring and overused b) isn't almost indistinguishable from what you're substituting c) isn't non-free with onerous licensing terms especially when used in the web d) isn't worse and unoptimized for screen, non-print purposes Now queue the font snobs' complaints ;)
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  This comment would be more useful if you recommended such a font.
  - throwaway294566 4y ago
    One part of "not boring" is picking one that fits your taste and the style of the site you are using it on. So there cannot be one canonical recommendation. Google fonts is full of usable stuff. Just have the courage to pick something that isn't mainstream yawn-inducing boredom. The other points are almost automatically satisified. For GDPR reasons, copy the font file to your webserver (caching won't work anyways in modern browsers). But if you really really want something safe, easy, no-thinking-required that works for almost everything, on most devices, is readable on screens, looks modern but sufficiently boring and inoffensive, has big unicode coverage: use Roboto.
    - toastal 4y ago
      Use them sure, but don't use Google's CDN and leak your user's data to Google's servers. It's not difficult to self-host the WOFF2 fonts.
- quesera 4y ago
  Consider me cued. Not queued, that's something else. I just dislike looking at the weak copy of Helvetica that Microsoft calls Arial, so I will replace it with some neo-grotesque that is close to the designer's intent. Helvetica is an easy choice. (Note that Arial itself was intended as a replacement for Helvetica when Helvetica is not available. Now that design in Arial is more common, it hardly feels wrong to replace Arial with the original -- and more-pleasing -- Helvetica. Personal preference yes, but what higher motivation is there?) Don't get me started on Verdana. But they did a pretty good job with Tahoma at least.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  Sure, I'll bite. a, b: The point is to correct what amounts to a a slight, unsightly, visual error. What you are suggesting is repainting the room in a new color, because there was a spot missed when applying the first layer of paint. c: I already have a license for that font and I am not forcing it on anyone else. This is like saying "Don't boot your mac into MacOS - it's non-free!" I know, I paid for it. d: I have a retina display. My pixel density is big enough that I don't need to bend the font to fit into the grid.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Gruber’s deeper point is that Apple is so particular about design and design standards. Apple has their own typeface. So having this slip through is, jokingly, a fire-able offense. It’s actually not about font snobbery, but about mocking Apple about their design standards. It’s a joke, not sure why people are taking it so seriously.
  - throwaway294566 4y ago
    As I'm forced to use an Apple computer for work from time to time (fortunately rarely), I do not understand how anyone can claim for Apple to have any standards. Especially when it comes to "design". Fonts look blurry and washed out everywhere. I don't care about the usual excuses, it is ugly ugly ugly...
- musicale 4y ago
  I've always disliked Arial. Thanks Microsoft/Monotype for making everything ugly and illegible. But my vote for the print (and PDF) typeface that has I would be very happy to never see again (at least in anything that isn't a mathematical formula) goes to Knuth/TeX's abominable Computer Modern.
dang 4y ago
Related: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804 - June 2022 (50 comments)
boffinism 4y ago
"Arial should be a firing offence" Grant me the comfortable self-righteousness of people who don't realise their personal aesthetic preferences are not objective statements of fact.
- quesera 4y ago
  There are worlds where typography matters. The web really isn't one of them. But they exist. In those worlds, Arial would be the equivalent of bringing the wrong tools to the job, in front of clients. No one is going to get hurt, but there is reputational damage to consider. With that said, of course in 99% of applications "firing offense" is a joke of overstated self-importance. And "firing squad" is the same, 110% of the time. Obviously.
  - politelemon 4y ago
    The reputational "damage" would be limited to a small set of obnoxious font snobs whose opinions should not be considered at all, in that catering to their perceptions helps nobody in any useful manner.
    - quesera 4y ago
      Sometimes those people are customers, and they matter a lot. They're also not wrong. The aesthetic of a typeface is a complicated thing. You have history and precedent to consider, for example. There are objectively incorrect choices, sometimes. The irony here is that Arial has always been the substitute because the real thing wasn't available. (i.e. Microsoft didn't want to pay to license Helvetica, whereas Apple did). So the reaction you're having to the idea of someone substituting the original for the replacement is a bit odd, I think. Maybe you're reacting to the idea of caring. You don't have to care what others care about.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > "Arial should be a firing offence" For people who are only reading these comments and not the article, this is not a quote by the developer of StopTheMadness. This quote is by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who is required by internet law to take strong positions on literally everything regardless of its relative importance. It should not deter macOS users from checking out the excellent StopTheMadness. EDIT: To whoever's downvoting, I like John Gruber. He has a sense of humor and would laugh at this characterization.
politelemon 4y ago
> What you may not know about Gruber, though, is that as much as he despises Arial, he dislikes Courier New even more! If Arial demands firing, then I suppose that Courier New demands… the firing squad? The glee with which the authors express this sentiment is a strange glimpse into a poisonous part of the web that I'm glad I don't frequent. Instead of being helpful, they emphasize gatekeeping and snobbery. This and the original linked, ate not a good quality post.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  They revel in it, and Gruber at least isn't just some kid anymore. He's old enough to have learned better.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Curious, isn’t pointing out individuals like this and call-out culture ironically the same thing?
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  I thought the article was making fun of Gruber for having such strong feelings against those two fonts. Or is that the poisonous part?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > I thought the article was making fun of Gruber for having such strong feelings against those two fonts. I wasn't making fun of Gruber, I was just exaggerating for comedic effect. Gruber himself seemed to like the post. I guess some people didn't find it funny, which is fine, but the OP seems to have gone overboard.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Snobbery exists everywhere from coffee aficionados to mechanical keyboard folk. I don’t see it in a way that you do, just people that are into it and they express their distaste or taste for things. It’s not coercion, it’s fair game.
dmichulke 4y ago
Serious question: what is so important about fonts? I don't consider them nearly interesting enough to load them from some remote server. Is there data to show that fonts improve anything objectively?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > don't consider them nearly interesting enough to load them from some remote server. Many, or even most, websites already do this by using custom fonts. Typography is valuable in the sense that the color palette used on a website is also valuable.
  - quesera 4y ago
    You can disable this behaviour. It's a reasonable choice, but there are pros (privacy, efficiency) and cons (layout mostly) to doing so.
  - wruza 4y ago
    Tbh, I hate most of these fonts (especially thin ones) and acid, blurry, pastel, dark, bright, washed, monochrome, contrast colors. I wish there was an accessibility standard for sighted fullcolor people so I could use everything without constant irritation. Design and typography are two top things for that syndrome where most unimportant details get maximal attention. For me sites with “cool design” usually correlate with “I read it thoroughly and still have no fucking idea what it is about, ctrl-w”. Maybe you should have prioritized texts over fonts.
- quesera 4y ago
  > Is there data to show that fonts improve anything objectively? Of course there are. The primary motivation is aesthetics though. This is of course part of "anything", but it's a bit subjective. Fonts (typefaces) make people so upset. You care, or you care not. Having strong opinions about what other people care about is a path to madness.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
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strenholme 4y ago
The advantage of using Arial/Arimo on web pages is that it is the only font which is installed on pretty much every single desktop computer or mobile phone. If someone wants a font stack which acts the same everywhere without the overhead of downloading a font, Arial is the only choice (While Android phones do have Tinos, it doesn’t have the same metrics as Times New Roman; go figure). Windows users have had it since the 1990s, Apple has licensed all of Microsoft’s core web fonts, and Linux/Android users have the Arimo font with the same metrics — and it’s a single apt-get command to legally install the actual Microsoft Core Web fonts, including Arial, on desktop Linux. Using Helvetica in a font stack with Linux has issues because many desktop distributions use the Ghostscript Helvetica equivalent font which has vertical alignment issues. Other fonts are often times substituted with different fonts which both change the look and metrics of a web page. The reason why compatible metrics is important is that elements using lettering have the exact same size on a web page, so there aren’t issues with a font overflowing or otherwise looking wrong when it looks fine with Arial. Substituting Arial with Helvetica might break how things look in a web page which assumes Arial metrics. Personally, I wish every computer out there (or at least every browser in widespread use) came with Noto Sans, Noto Serif, and Noto Sans Mono so that something like “font face: Noto Serif” would look and act the same way everywhere, but Arial is as close as we get to that.
- quesera 4y ago
  > Substituting Arial with Helvetica might break how things look in a web page which assumes Arial metrics. Arial is designed with the same metrics as Helvetica because Arial is a copy of Helvetica. Replacing Arial with Helvetica is just restoring things to the original-not-encumbered-by-licensing-decisions standard. Some people may prefer Arial due to familiarity etc (a distaste for quirky capital Rs?). Some people may not care. But Helvetica is the original.
  - strenholme 4y ago
    >Arial is designed with the same metrics as Helvetica Mostly true, as per https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Metric-compatible_fonts https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Metric-compatible_fonts but Arimo is designed to have the exact same metrics as Arial, which is important for situations where one is testing a web page/app and can only avoid testing a different font if it’s guaranteed to act in the very same manner. I don’t think Apple guarantees that their Helvetica is compatible with Arial to that degree. Using Helvetica in a font stack on a web page[1] isn’t practical unless one discards that 1-2% of Linux desktop users out there, since they will often get Nimbus Sans which has a different vertical alignment. In terms of the power users with custom CSS which replaces all instances of Arial with Apple’s Helvetica, they are probably clued enough to understand it might screw up the alignment of an element tied to a font’s exact metrics on a web page. I agree it’s unlikely, but I also remember when clients insisted on “pixel perfect” HTML/CSS renderings of their Photoshop-generated layout template. [1] If they have a Helvetica implementation as a .woff/.woff2 web font, this doesn’t apply. I’m assuming that this is a web page which doesn’t have any downloaded fonts.
aliqot 4y ago
mhd 4y ago
Font nerdery is a bit like the old "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912", you can be angry about very minor details. Doesn't even stop at the font, as I'm sure there are people saying that only Stempel Helvetica is the true Helvetica etc. (Approaching a bunch of old-school typophiles and screaming "Garamond!" is a true Rex-Kramer-Danger-Seeker-esque act) Having said that, there are plenty of sites that could do with a better font choice, and if you still want to leave most designers their creative freedom (i.e. don't turn off site fonts), this looks like a decent way to add that minor
brainzap 4y ago
I overwrite all fonts with the system default. It is glorious, uniform reading experience.

31 points by alsetmusic 4y ago

Substituting Arial by Helvetica is the ultimate expression of pointless counterproductive font snobbery. If you really want to do the world some good, substitute by something that a) isn't boring and overused b) isn't almost indistinguishable from what you're substituting c) isn't non-free with onerous licensing terms especially when used in the web d) isn't worse and unoptimized for screen, non-print purposes Now queue the font snobs' complaints ;)

8ytecoder 4y ago
This comment would be more useful if you recommended such a font.
- throwaway294566 4y ago
  One part of "not boring" is picking one that fits your taste and the style of the site you are using it on. So there cannot be one canonical recommendation. Google fonts is full of usable stuff. Just have the courage to pick something that isn't mainstream yawn-inducing boredom. The other points are almost automatically satisified. For GDPR reasons, copy the font file to your webserver (caching won't work anyways in modern browsers). But if you really really want something safe, easy, no-thinking-required that works for almost everything, on most devices, is readable on screens, looks modern but sufficiently boring and inoffensive, has big unicode coverage: use Roboto.
  - toastal 4y ago
    Use them sure, but don't use Google's CDN and leak your user's data to Google's servers. It's not difficult to self-host the WOFF2 fonts.
quesera 4y ago
Consider me cued. Not queued, that's something else. I just dislike looking at the weak copy of Helvetica that Microsoft calls Arial, so I will replace it with some neo-grotesque that is close to the designer's intent. Helvetica is an easy choice. (Note that Arial itself was intended as a replacement for Helvetica when Helvetica is not available. Now that design in Arial is more common, it hardly feels wrong to replace Arial with the original -- and more-pleasing -- Helvetica. Personal preference yes, but what higher motivation is there?) Don't get me started on Verdana. But they did a pretty good job with Tahoma at least.
wodenokoto 4y ago
Sure, I'll bite. a, b: The point is to correct what amounts to a a slight, unsightly, visual error. What you are suggesting is repainting the room in a new color, because there was a spot missed when applying the first layer of paint. c: I already have a license for that font and I am not forcing it on anyone else. This is like saying "Don't boot your mac into MacOS - it's non-free!" I know, I paid for it. d: I have a retina display. My pixel density is big enough that I don't need to bend the font to fit into the grid.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Gruber’s deeper point is that Apple is so particular about design and design standards. Apple has their own typeface. So having this slip through is, jokingly, a fire-able offense. It’s actually not about font snobbery, but about mocking Apple about their design standards. It’s a joke, not sure why people are taking it so seriously.
- throwaway294566 4y ago
  As I'm forced to use an Apple computer for work from time to time (fortunately rarely), I do not understand how anyone can claim for Apple to have any standards. Especially when it comes to "design". Fonts look blurry and washed out everywhere. I don't care about the usual excuses, it is ugly ugly ugly...
musicale 4y ago
I've always disliked Arial. Thanks Microsoft/Monotype for making everything ugly and illegible. But my vote for the print (and PDF) typeface that has I would be very happy to never see again (at least in anything that isn't a mathematical formula) goes to Knuth/TeX's abominable Computer Modern.

dang 4y ago

Related: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804 - June 2022 (50 comments)

boffinism 4y ago

"Arial should be a firing offence" Grant me the comfortable self-righteousness of people who don't realise their personal aesthetic preferences are not objective statements of fact.

quesera 4y ago
There are worlds where typography matters. The web really isn't one of them. But they exist. In those worlds, Arial would be the equivalent of bringing the wrong tools to the job, in front of clients. No one is going to get hurt, but there is reputational damage to consider. With that said, of course in 99% of applications "firing offense" is a joke of overstated self-importance. And "firing squad" is the same, 110% of the time. Obviously.
- politelemon 4y ago
  The reputational "damage" would be limited to a small set of obnoxious font snobs whose opinions should not be considered at all, in that catering to their perceptions helps nobody in any useful manner.
  - quesera 4y ago
    Sometimes those people are customers, and they matter a lot. They're also not wrong. The aesthetic of a typeface is a complicated thing. You have history and precedent to consider, for example. There are objectively incorrect choices, sometimes. The irony here is that Arial has always been the substitute because the real thing wasn't available. (i.e. Microsoft didn't want to pay to license Helvetica, whereas Apple did). So the reaction you're having to the idea of someone substituting the original for the replacement is a bit odd, I think. Maybe you're reacting to the idea of caring. You don't have to care what others care about.
CharlesW 4y ago
> "Arial should be a firing offence" For people who are only reading these comments and not the article, this is not a quote by the developer of StopTheMadness. This quote is by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who is required by internet law to take strong positions on literally everything regardless of its relative importance. It should not deter macOS users from checking out the excellent StopTheMadness. EDIT: To whoever's downvoting, I like John Gruber. He has a sense of humor and would laugh at this characterization.

politelemon 4y ago

> What you may not know about Gruber, though, is that as much as he despises Arial, he dislikes Courier New even more! If Arial demands firing, then I suppose that Courier New demands… the firing squad? The glee with which the authors express this sentiment is a strange glimpse into a poisonous part of the web that I'm glad I don't frequent. Instead of being helpful, they emphasize gatekeeping and snobbery. This and the original linked, ate not a good quality post.

JasonFruit 4y ago
They revel in it, and Gruber at least isn't just some kid anymore. He's old enough to have learned better.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Curious, isn’t pointing out individuals like this and call-out culture ironically the same thing?
wodenokoto 4y ago
I thought the article was making fun of Gruber for having such strong feelings against those two fonts. Or is that the poisonous part?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I thought the article was making fun of Gruber for having such strong feelings against those two fonts. I wasn't making fun of Gruber, I was just exaggerating for comedic effect. Gruber himself seemed to like the post. I guess some people didn't find it funny, which is fine, but the OP seems to have gone overboard.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Snobbery exists everywhere from coffee aficionados to mechanical keyboard folk. I don’t see it in a way that you do, just people that are into it and they express their distaste or taste for things. It’s not coercion, it’s fair game.

dmichulke 4y ago

Serious question: what is so important about fonts? I don't consider them nearly interesting enough to load them from some remote server. Is there data to show that fonts improve anything objectively?

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> don't consider them nearly interesting enough to load them from some remote server. Many, or even most, websites already do this by using custom fonts. Typography is valuable in the sense that the color palette used on a website is also valuable.
- quesera 4y ago
  You can disable this behaviour. It's a reasonable choice, but there are pros (privacy, efficiency) and cons (layout mostly) to doing so.
- wruza 4y ago
  Tbh, I hate most of these fonts (especially thin ones) and acid, blurry, pastel, dark, bright, washed, monochrome, contrast colors. I wish there was an accessibility standard for sighted fullcolor people so I could use everything without constant irritation. Design and typography are two top things for that syndrome where most unimportant details get maximal attention. For me sites with “cool design” usually correlate with “I read it thoroughly and still have no fucking idea what it is about, ctrl-w”. Maybe you should have prioritized texts over fonts.
quesera 4y ago
> Is there data to show that fonts improve anything objectively? Of course there are. The primary motivation is aesthetics though. This is of course part of "anything", but it's a bit subjective. Fonts (typefaces) make people so upset. You care, or you care not. Having strong opinions about what other people care about is a path to madness.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

strenholme 4y ago

The advantage of using Arial/Arimo on web pages is that it is the only font which is installed on pretty much every single desktop computer or mobile phone. If someone wants a font stack which acts the same everywhere without the overhead of downloading a font, Arial is the only choice (While Android phones do have Tinos, it doesn’t have the same metrics as Times New Roman; go figure). Windows users have had it since the 1990s, Apple has licensed all of Microsoft’s core web fonts, and Linux/Android users have the Arimo font with the same metrics — and it’s a single apt-get command to legally install the actual Microsoft Core Web fonts, including Arial, on desktop Linux. Using Helvetica in a font stack with Linux has issues because many desktop distributions use the Ghostscript Helvetica equivalent font which has vertical alignment issues. Other fonts are often times substituted with different fonts which both change the look and metrics of a web page. The reason why compatible metrics is important is that elements using lettering have the exact same size on a web page, so there aren’t issues with a font overflowing or otherwise looking wrong when it looks fine with Arial. Substituting Arial with Helvetica might break how things look in a web page which assumes Arial metrics. Personally, I wish every computer out there (or at least every browser in widespread use) came with Noto Sans, Noto Serif, and Noto Sans Mono so that something like “font face: Noto Serif” would look and act the same way everywhere, but Arial is as close as we get to that.

quesera 4y ago
> Substituting Arial with Helvetica might break how things look in a web page which assumes Arial metrics. Arial is designed with the same metrics as Helvetica because Arial is a copy of Helvetica. Replacing Arial with Helvetica is just restoring things to the original-not-encumbered-by-licensing-decisions standard. Some people may prefer Arial due to familiarity etc (a distaste for quirky capital Rs?). Some people may not care. But Helvetica is the original.
- strenholme 4y ago
  >Arial is designed with the same metrics as Helvetica Mostly true, as per https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Metric-compatible_fonts https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Metric-compatible_fonts but Arimo is designed to have the exact same metrics as Arial, which is important for situations where one is testing a web page/app and can only avoid testing a different font if it’s guaranteed to act in the very same manner. I don’t think Apple guarantees that their Helvetica is compatible with Arial to that degree. Using Helvetica in a font stack on a web page[1] isn’t practical unless one discards that 1-2% of Linux desktop users out there, since they will often get Nimbus Sans which has a different vertical alignment. In terms of the power users with custom CSS which replaces all instances of Arial with Apple’s Helvetica, they are probably clued enough to understand it might screw up the alignment of an element tied to a font’s exact metrics on a web page. I agree it’s unlikely, but I also remember when clients insisted on “pixel perfect” HTML/CSS renderings of their Photoshop-generated layout template. [1] If they have a Helvetica implementation as a .woff/.woff2 web font, this doesn’t apply. I’m assuming that this is a web page which doesn’t have any downloaded fonts.

aliqot 4y ago

mhd 4y ago

Font nerdery is a bit like the old "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912", you can be angry about very minor details. Doesn't even stop at the font, as I'm sure there are people saying that only Stempel Helvetica is the true Helvetica etc. (Approaching a bunch of old-school typophiles and screaming "Garamond!" is a true Rex-Kramer-Danger-Seeker-esque act) Having said that, there are plenty of sites that could do with a better font choice, and if you still want to leave most designers their creative freedom (i.e. don't turn off site fonts), this looks like a decent way to add that minor

brainzap 4y ago

I overwrite all fonts with the system default. It is glorious, uniform reading experience.