It may look better but it's harder to read basically across the board for anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia without going all the way to a dyslexia specific font. They're also generally far better for people with all sorts of poor vision.

It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.

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Fnoord 2 days ago | parent [-]

For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please. The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability. Especially on printed media since there it cannot be changed in a whim.

A couple of years ago I went into archives of Dutch newspapers to learn whether and how the famine of hunger in Ukraine (known as Holodomor) was reported back in 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?

Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.

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tommica 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability.

The thing about usability is that it's both objective and subjective, and one can argue that aesthetics is part of usability. For example, I find writing code much more pleasant with Comic Code font, and I can imagine that there are other people that would hate it.

	▲	rtkwe 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure but I think we could agree it looking nice ranks lower than being structurally more difficult to read for people? If there were a freely preinstalled option that was both sure but given the choice between functional and aesthetic readability wins hands down.

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codechicago277 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Off topic but did you find anything interesting? I spent a few days researching Holodomor and was surprised how poorly understood it still is even today, and badly reported at the time. Good propaganda case study. There’s a dramatic film about the reporting too, Mr. Jones (2019).

	▲	vintermann 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I haven't researched it explicitly, but I do come across "what happens in the wider world" notices in small historical newspapers and sometimes I search to see what it was about. Saw a mention about some general winning an important victory, searched his name, found out he was one of the whites, and the first thing claimed about him was that he only came in "once the war was already lost".
	▲	Fnoord 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What I found was that yes, it was reported about, but very little. The notable person who did research the event, Gareth Jones, is indeed an interesting story (he was also referenced to by the newspapers). I believe it was underreported, but we could've known. Helped, now that is a different question I don't dare to answer. The Soviets used disgusting tactics in Eastern Europe, see the book Bloodlands.

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MadnessASAP 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please.

Ever tried changing the font of a printed document? Or a PDF?

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Fnoord 2 days ago | parent [-]

Printed document isn't what I was on about. There the default should 100% be about accessibility (and then we just want that by default cause we're used to it).

PDF -> Nope.

.doc(x) -> Sure.

Website, OS, apps (including terminal) -> Sure.

Now regarding PDF I might've tried a long time ago when reading some old document (like CIA about MKULTRA). I don't remember if I succeeded. But there are PDF editors out there. I do think it likely screws layout (esp. larger documents), but that can be true for .doc(x) as well.

	▲	MadnessASAP a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think it would be a smaller issue if it only applied to digital media. Presumably though this applies to all media. And I can certainly confirm that changing the font of PDF will almost always result in a unreadable mess. Something about how a PDF doesn't have text "blocks" and instead fixes each character making text reflow almost impossible.