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The backlash against the world's most hated font may be ending
- not_your_vase 2y agoAs I noticed most Comic Sans haters actually don't hate Comic Sans. It is actually fun little font, with the only fault of becoming a boring cliche due to overuse. Most of the hate comes from frequent improper use - fun little fonts have their place, but not at a funeral for example.
- j45 2y agoToo many people let themselves follow in participating in prejudice, whether it’s against programming languages, and fonts. Reading about it, Comic sans was a very different font at one time.
- politelemon 2y agoI see similar behaviour with pineapple on pizza, as well as nano. Easy targets make for almost pavlovian responses.
- voidUpdate 2y agoNano is good! Pineapple on pizza is in some circumstances. You should try the potato pizza they serve at CERN
- Gualdrapo 2y ago> fun little fonts have their place, but not at a funeral for example And definitely not when you're announcing the world you just found evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-co...
- srockets 2y agoWhy not? This isn’t TED: the impressive stuff is the content, not the presentation.
- hnlmorg 2y ago(That’s referenced in the opening paragraph of the main article) I actually think that’s the perfect time to use that font. It’s a celebration font and breakthroughs in physics should be celebrated.
- yen223 2y agoIf you verified the existence of the Higgs Boson you should be entitled to use any font your heart desires.
- prmoustache 2y agoIt was not in a scientific paper but in the presentation, were a legible letter, even seen from far in the conference room, is more important than anything.
- beardyw 2y agoPublishing important papers in Latin has also fallen out of favour.
- somat 2y agoIt's a sort of shibboleth, a filter to separate the audience into two groups. do you care about the evidence of the higgs boson or do you care about the use of that infernal font. Quite often people from the openbsd project will use the font in their presentations, to much the same effect. Which as a harmless sort of trolling, I find hilarious. They even went out of their way to encode it as the default font on their web server. http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.sbin/httpd/server_http.c?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.sbin/httpd/server_http.c?r... http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/httpd/server_http.c.diff?r1=1.1&r2=1.2 http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/httpd/...
- srockets 2y agoComic sans was created due to the improper use of Times New Roman in Microsoft Bob’s speech balloons[1], but it turns out to be quite useful: the significant differences between the glyphs make it very dyslexic-friendly. —-- [1] http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm
- mrob 2y agoI'm not aware of any scientific research using Comic Sans itself, but a font designed specifically to aid dyslexics using the supposedly beneficial features found in Comic Sans failed to help: "Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6 But it didn't do any harm either, so if you like Comic Sans you might as well stick with it.
- diogenescynic 2y agoComic Sans, JNCOs, and all kinds of bad styles are coming back in vogue.
- aspenmayer 2y agoI still have some vintage JNCOs. They make great gifts and are fun to bust out at the appropriate venues.
- yen223 2y agoSomeone made a monospaced version of Comic Sans, and it's ... not terrible? https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Arcuru 2y agoThere’s also Comic Code, which is a new font drawn in the same style. https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code
- shiroiushi 2y agoThis one is much better than the original: the 'a' is drawn properly, instead of like an 'o' with a tiny tail that's easy to miss.
- LordHeini 2y agoApart from esthetic considerations which are more or less personal taste Comic Sans is very readable. Things like wobly lines or non symmetric letters (p q) help readability a lot. Many fonts for the dyslexic use similar styling techniques to avoid letters flipping for example. Programmer fonts are usually made for readability and I would assume the same holds true there.
- emaro 2y agoI recently switched to it for coding and surprisingly I love it. It's readability is very high.
- m463 2y agoseems like next logical step is to adapt this to .psf for a console font.
- tmountain 2y agoBetter than a lot of “hip” fonts that I have seen recently.
- Mengkudulangsat 2y agoThe only reason I hate Comic Sans is because I'm told to do so by the Internet.
- itronitron 2y agoThe Internet hates Comic Sans because the font is neither tribal nor futuristic.
- 082349872349872 2y agoMight you have any links to extended explorations of a tribal/futuristic dichotomy? [I guess I'm in today's 10k because I last saw it discussed in Pareto, The Mind and Society (1935): an english translation of a 1916 work, which would be slightly pre-internet] Lagniappe: https://i.imgflip.com/97mu1r.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/97mu1r.jpg
- itronitron 2y agoPapyrus probably best captures that dichotomy >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
- 082349872349872 2y ago<tinfoil> Mystery solved! That secret Kiwi conspirator Kim Sinclair, having noticed that people tend to have either tribal, Baskerville, sentiments that cause them to invent rationalisations for following aggregates of existing practices, or futuristic, Microgramma, sentiments that cause them to invent rationalisations for trying combinations of novel practices, used his 2009 opportunity to nudge a global audience in the direction of balanced, Papyrus, sentiments, from which one may hope they derive more rational rationalisations. </tinfoil>
- yen223 2y agoOnly just noticed, if you google "Comic Sans" the font changes.
- deafpolygon 2y agoI appreciate Comic Sans. It's fun and whimsical, in a sea of overly serious fonts.
- simonjgreen 2y agoComic Sans is, at least in UK, commonly used in schools due to it being the only Windows native font that has letters drawn the way children are taught to write them in early school
- anthk 2y agoSome GNU/Linux (libre games actually) have cursive fonts too.
- anthk 2y agoComic Sans is good for dyslexic people.
- nikanj 2y agoHating Comic Sans is a meme, and the hate will never end. People make hating it a facet of their personality, the same way hating pineapple on pizza is made into a core trait
- The_Colonel 2y agoYeah, it's this tribal bandwagon mentality. People think that having strong opinions is a sign of intelligence, and it's quite safe to just adopt what other apparently smart people agree on. There's a lot of it in the tech world - PHP bad, bash good, MySQL bad, Postgres good. I adopted most of these views when I was young (~15 years ago) because older, more experienced people were saying those things.
- xanderlewis 2y agoI think you’re overestimating the seriousness of these statements of ‘hatred’. Isn’t it all a bit of a joke? I thought it was, anyway. > People think that having strong opinions is a sign of intelligence …which is very strange, because it seems quite clear that a hallmark of intelligence (or at least thoughtfulness) is the ability to sit on the fence and hold multiple — seemingly contradictory — opinions at once.
- The_Colonel 2y ago> I think you’re overestimating the seriousness of these statements of ‘hatred’. Isn’t it all a bit of a joke? I thought it was, anyway. No, at least not exclusively. > …which is very strange, because it seems quite clear that a hallmark of intelligence (or at least thoughtfulness) is the ability to sit on the fence and hold multiple — seemingly contradictory — opinions at once. I think seeing the world as multi-faceted and multi-colored (as opposed to black & white) is a sign of thoughtfulness. Many of these "contradictions" will then dissolve in the air.
- ykonstant 2y agoIn a former HN post about Comic Sans, I linked a math seminar lecture that used a modified Comic Sans asking for the exact font and remarked that it looks very nice. The only response I got was one trashing me for insinuating a Comic Sans-derived font would look good, saying the presentation looked awful, and not answering my question about the font.
- SwiftyBug 2y agoMy state-issued, official high school diploma is written in Comic Sans. I love it!
- xanderlewis 2y agoCan we all at least agree to hate Arial?
- rffn 2y agoI do not think I can agree to hate something, in particular in larger groups.
- xanderlewis 2y agoHow virtuous you are.
- matltc 2y agohttps://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
- hyperman1 2y agohttps://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.html https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.ht...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Timwi 2y agoPlease stop posting websites that show only half the article. Post a full article or none at all.
- fortran77 2y agoI only follow the Hacker News guidelines. (I see the whole article because I pay for it, but there are other ways.) If you don't like the Hacker News guidelines about links to paywalled sites, you're welcome to try any of the other websites on the Internet.
- hawkjo 2y agoComic Sans getting all this hate… Papyrus is feeling left out https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=8qENZvgeBrRdB-xp https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=8qENZvgeBrRdB-xp