# Font hurt my eyes



## suburst (Feb 23, 2021)

I find many times that I can't read a big post cause of the font probably. Its too big , too bold, and the capitals are too close to each other, maybe also its too sharp. I am not sure whats happening, but it does hurt my eyes. Something is wrong

look at this post for example: https://vi-control.net/community/th...helm-plugin-alliance-ik-multimedia-d16.97879/


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## d.healey (Feb 23, 2021)

suburst said:


> I find many times that I can't read a big post cause of the font probably. Its too big , too bold, and the capitals are too close to each other, maybe also its too sharp. I am not sure whats happening, but it does hurt my eyes. Something is wrong
> 
> look at this post for example: https://vi-control.net/community/th...helm-plugin-alliance-ik-multimedia-d16.97879/


Post a screenshot so we see what you see. Fonts can be appear different on different browsers or with different browser settings.

For example I see this in Chromium:





And this in Firefox


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## Polkasound (Feb 23, 2021)

suburst said:


> I find many times that I can't read a big post cause of the font probably.


If you happen to be viewing the forum in dark mode, switch to light mode. That should make big posts easier to read.

If you're going to be spending a lot of time browsing a big post, you can always copy the text from the post, paste it into a program like WordPad, and change font to Georgia or something else with a serif.


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## MartinH. (Feb 23, 2021)

Also there are browser extensions to write your own custom stilesheets for websites and change things like fonts or colors on your end.


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## PaulieDC (Feb 23, 2021)

With all due respect to Leon who did the post, ALL CAPS ARE VERY ANNOYING, but then proceed to *MAKE ALL CAPS BOLD MAKES IT EVEN WORSE*. Some of that ad falls on the OP. It's not a crime but that's what makes it hard to ingest.


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## PaulieDC (Feb 23, 2021)

Not to mention, that ad Leon posted, as a new member, looks more like a store, not a bloke selling off some gear. One of the things that makes stuff easy to read is if we don't YAP too much, lol, but that ad is way over the top. Messes with my eyes also.


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## suburst (Mar 1, 2021)

d.healey said:


> Post a screenshot so we see what you see. Fonts can be appear different on different browsers or with different browser settings.
> 
> For example I see this in Chromium:
> 
> ...


This what I see


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## pondinthestream (Mar 1, 2021)

Yeah that ad post looks awful to me as well - I would not be able to read it all comfortably


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## MauroPantin (Mar 1, 2021)

I use an extension called Stylus on Firefox to change the font for VI-C (and many others). I use this code:

`html {
font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, sans-serif !important;
}`

Not bashing on the font choice of VI-C, though. Just very particular about how things should look to me.


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## Polkasound (Mar 1, 2021)

suburst said:


> This what I see


That looks normal. It's just the nature of the ad... lots of text, dividers, hyphens, line breaks... that you have to peruse it with a little more focus. But I still recommend you try reading it in Light Mode (click the tiny light bulb at the bottom of the page) because you may find that black text on a white background makes the reading go faster.


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## HereGiam (Mar 1, 2021)

suburst said:


> I find many times that I can't read a big post cause of the font probably. Its too big , too bold, and the capitals are too close to each other, maybe also its too sharp. I am not sure whats happening, but it does hurt my eyes. Something is wrong


I agree. I think the problem is the line height is too small by default in the message body.

The line height is only 1.4 which means assuming your browser is using the standard 16px font, that's only 22.4px. In my opinion that's too small - I would prefer it closer to 2 which would improve the readability, especially when there are large blocks of text.

If you can find a browser extension that lets you tweak this it might help.


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## Polkasound (Mar 1, 2021)

A related question for my fellow VI-C members:

Almost all websites that publish articles online these days put a lot of space between lines. The articles basically look double-spaced. It seems to have become a standard practice. Do people actually find that easier to read, or is it just a commonplace method for creating more space to place ads?

I still publish all my online articles with single spacing, because that's always been my preference. Nobody's complained yet, but if more space between lines does help a lot of people read better, I'll take that into consideration and start experimenting with it.


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## creativeforge (Mar 1, 2021)

OK, I made some modifications: line-height now at 1.5 and letter-spacing at 1.1. Let me know if that helps?

BEFORE:






AFTER


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## creativeforge (Mar 1, 2021)

Polkasound said:


> A related question for my fellow VI-C members:
> 
> Almost all websites that publish articles online these days put a lot of space between lines. The articles basically look double-spaced. It seems to have become a standard practice. Do people actually find that easier to read, or is it just a commonplace method for creating more space to place ads?
> 
> I still publish all my online articles with single spacing, because that's always been my preference. Nobody's complained yet, but if more space between lines does help a lot of people read better, I'll take that into consideration and start experimenting with it.



I personally find the "double spacing" makes it harder to read. You can find a good medium playing with the line-height. I just modified it here to 1.5


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## HereGiam (Mar 1, 2021)

creativeforge said:


> OK, I made some modifications: line-height now at 1.5 and letter-spacing at 1.1. Let me know if that helps?


That's certainly better - when I inspect the CSS I see there are two .message-body class stylings. One is setting line-height at 1.75 and the second overrides it down to 1.5 (that's the one you changed). If I'm honest, I prefer it at 1.75.

Given it's a forum so you cannot control how people write in terms of paragraphs. If the paragraphs stay short you can get away with less. On smaller devices though even a short paragraph can take up a lot of vertical space, which is why I prefer bigger line heights.


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## tonaliszt (Mar 1, 2021)

creativeforge said:


> OK, I made some modifications: line-height now at 1.5 and letter-spacing at 1.1. Let me know if that helps?
> 
> BEFORE:
> 
> ...


This has made it much worse imo


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## Polkasound (Mar 1, 2021)

creativeforge said:


> I personally find the "double spacing" makes it harder to read. You can find a good medium playing with the line-height. I just modified it here to 1.5


Thanks for the input. I experimented with one of my articles by changing the spacing to 1.5. I'm going to try to solicit some feedback from my readers.

Regarding the line spacing on this forum, I vote to put it back the way it was. Instead of looking like sentences and paragraphs, the words look too scattered.


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## creativeforge (Mar 1, 2021)

tonaliszt said:


> This has made it much worse imo


OK, I just made letter-spacing at 1px and I think that helped...


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## Markrs (Mar 1, 2021)

The sudden font change has took me by surprise. Not a fan personally as the letters look almost monospaced and that lack of grouping it making it more difficult to read.


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## Markrs (Mar 1, 2021)

By the way my comment isn't critism I am a fan of trying things out and experimenting just feedback on how it looked to me.


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## creativeforge (Mar 1, 2021)

Markrs said:


> The sudden font change has took me by surprise. Not a fan personally as the letters look almost monospaced and that lack of grouping it making it more difficult to read.


OK thanks. Everything is back to where it was. 

Good job, group, give yourselves a hand!


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## creativeforge (Mar 1, 2021)

Markrs said:


> By the way my comment isn't critism I am a fan of trying things out and experimenting just feedback on how it looked to me.


Oh I have no problem with the feedback, Markrs, that's how we find a community sweet spot.


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## ShikiSuen (Mar 3, 2021)

What I suggested previously should still work.


```
.message-body {font-family: Helvetica Neue, sans-serif;}
html {font-weight: 400; font-family: Helvetica Neue, sans-serif}
```

There is a reason why XenForo 2 uses Helvetica Neue by default.

Let's not make this as a default value but a user-choosable option.


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## mscp (Mar 5, 2021)

Polkasound said:


> A related question for my fellow VI-C members:
> 
> Almost all websites that publish articles online these days put a lot of space between lines. The articles basically look double-spaced. It seems to have become a standard practice. Do people actually find that easier to read, or is it just a commonplace method for creating more space to place ads?
> 
> I still publish all my online articles with single spacing, because that's always been my preference. Nobody's complained yet, but if more space between lines does help a lot of people read better, I'll take that into consideration and start experimenting with it.


Double spacing is way more comfortable to read for me. Personal opinion. It looks cleaner, and feels nicer.


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## ShikiSuen (Mar 8, 2021)

Polkasound said:


> A related question for my fellow VI-C members:
> 
> Almost all websites that publish articles online these days put a lot of space between lines. The articles basically look double-spaced. It seems to have become a standard practice. Do people actually find that easier to read, or is it just a commonplace method for creating more space to place ads?
> 
> I still publish all my online articles with single spacing, because that's always been my preference. Nobody's complained yet, but if more space between lines does help a lot of people read better, I'll take that into consideration and start experimenting with it.


Doublespace is required initially for writing academic papers (since it leaves spaces for professors to annotate where needs to be fixed). It shouldn't be regarded as a standard practice for reading occasions that does not require spaces for annotations. If it should be, then why all our daily newspapers are not printed in doublespace?

Verdana & Courier (incl. Courier New) was initially made to make printings "visually doublespaced as a result" when using word processing softwares / typography softwares that doesn't support tuning the heights of line-spaces. Plus, enlarged glyph widths can slightly reduce the amount of contents per-line, reducing horizontal spaces required for annotation per each amount of printed contents. Misusing such fonts in general reading occasions (without deep consideration of actual usage scenarios) should be considered as a user-experience disaster.


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## Polkasound (Mar 8, 2021)

Phil and Shiki, thank you for your input and information.

After bouncing around to random websites with articles, it seems most articles are published with a line spacing between 1.4 and 2.0. So I started using 1.4 for my articles.


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## ShikiSuen (Mar 8, 2021)

Polkasound said:


> Phil and Shiki, thank you for your input and information.
> 
> After bouncing around to random websites with articles, it seems most articles are published with a line spacing between 1.4 and 2.0. So I started using 1.4 for my articles.


If only typing Latin contents, Line-Height 1.4em is fine.
Note that this excludes the vertical space needed by "descender".

However, if typing mixed contents with Chinese / Japanese / Korean, you set the line at 1.7em since CJK glyphs always use up the whole glyph space square, including those being used by "descender".

This is what LineHeight 1.7em looks like:
(LineHeight 1.7em; Fonts fallbacked from "Inter" to macOS default zh-Hans-CN font "PingFang SC".)









Inter font family


Inter is a typeface family optimized for user interfaces and computer screens




rsms.me


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