Typeface choice gone

Report · Sep 12, 2012

The Advanced Editor window has experienced some changes today. One of the unwanted ones is that the hability to choose typefaces is gone, or extremely well hidden.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

I don't know about you, but I think this a great improvement. Typographic consistancy greatly improves readability in documents.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

It is if the font used is easily legible on screen at the small size employed in these forums. Which isn't the case of our new Adobe font.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

Have you tried the page magnification? This can be done by pressing cmd/ctrl and the plus symbol.

I don't have a problem, but that's just my young eyes. I can definitely understand how many users could have an issue with this.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

I object strongly to a site designed in such a way that it forces users to use workarounds to make it function decently. And yes, many of us have very old eyes for which this typeface/size presents problems. It shouldn't be our resposibility to correct for poor design and wrong decissions.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

Font choice has been removed by the last forum "upgrade" last week. But it seems that users can still play with fonts if they have enough imagination; see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1065852

Report · Sep 13, 2012

Pat, thanks, but see my message above.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

I think the point of removing font choice is to make the forum look more uniform. It doesn't help you if you can make your own post look more legible; other users' posts will still be different.

I for one am glad that users can no longer post technical questions in Comic Sans…

(But they can still color their post in pink, if they are so inclined!)

Report · Sep 13, 2012

More uniform: remove different backgrounds for different casts. Remove colour from badges. Don't allow URLs or email addresses as screen names. Limit the length of screen names. Remove bold, italics, underlining and strikethrough. And frankly, I cannot understand why removing font choice makes these forums look more unifom if coloured text is still allowed...

I for one am not glad that I can no longer use a highly readable font such as Verdana.

Report · Sep 13, 2012

Claudio González wrote:
More uniform: remove different backgrounds for different casts.

Agreed.

Remove colour from badges.

Agreed.

Don't allow URLs or email addresses as screen names.

Agreed.

Limit the length of screen names.

Agreed.

Claudio González wrote:
Remove bold, italics, underlining and strikethrough.

For me, these emphasis tools are useful.

I cannot understand why removing font choice makes these forums look more unifom if coloured text is still allowed...

Indeed. However, it was just my own interpretation that they wanted to achieve a more uniform look; the "designers" do not share their motivation with us, not do they seem to consult anyone. It is quite possible that they change things just for the pure fun of it...

Report · Sep 14, 2012

Pat Willener wrote:
Claudio González wrote:
...
I cannot understand why removing font choice makes these forums look more unifom if coloured text is still allowed...
Indeed. However, it was just my own interpretation that they wanted to achieve a more uniform look; the "designers" do not share their motivation with us, not do they seem to consult anyone. It is quite possible that they change things just for the pure fun of it...

Nice to see we have such a high degree of agreement. And I think that it is indeed true that there doesn't seem to be much planification, and that they don't pay too much attention to participants. For example, I don't know how many times and for how many years I have suggested that we get something like this

instead of the box we have, that gives no clue about how many pages there are in the forum, and permits advancing only one page at a time...

Report · Sep 14, 2012

It is very unfortunate that some remote designers' "vision" is more important than active forum users' wishes.

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Claudio, I was once critical of your choice to edit your posts to forcibly use Verdana, but I have started to come 'round. I'm sorry for any criticism you may have felt from me in the past (though to be accurate I was arguing at the time in favor of a better font than the current Adobe-Clean that is in use here).

Adobe-Clean is a poorly designed font to be the public face of a computer software company, because, well, it's just bad for use to express high tech stuff, and it's not even properly being displayed by the forum software (italics are botched by Typekit for all Internet Explorer browsers, which instead just the skew the Normal face to oblique). Consider this text in both Regular and Italic variants:

With Adobe-Clean regular, it's fairly easy to \see\ which of |these| things is /surrounded/ by what kinds of special characters (backslash, vertical bar, forward slash)...

When italics are used, it's not quite /so/ terribly |easy| to pick \out\ the differences, however.

For you, Claudio, I have attempted to use HTML to format the majority of this post in Verdana. Whether I have succeeded will be revealed after posting.

-Noel

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Thanks, Noel. There is an old Spanish saying that can be freely translated as "the devil knows more by being old than by being cunning", although this involves an untranslatable word play, because we also call diablo (devil) someone who is cunning. I hope the meaning is clear in my translated version.

I started using Verdana in my posts when they began using here the highly unreadable (on screen) Arial, and at a very tiny size. I chose Verdana as one example of a font that was designed specialy for onscreen reading, very successfully in my opinion, although there are of course others. Now they have changed to a font of their own, Adobe Clean I think. This has meant an improvement, although not a very large one: at the size used here, I had never noticed the very slight difference between an upper case "i" and a lower case "L" until someone pointed it to me.

To top it all, right now the font used for text in the reply window looks as Times to my untrained eye, and this changes to Adobe Clean after posting. Very cunning.

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Understood completely. We also often say "you little devil" when recognizing someone for being tricky or cunning.

Another thing I've noticed, and it's not limited to Adobe's font, but it DOES make a difference under some conditions, is that the Italic Adobe-Clean font seems more compressed horizontally than its Regular counterpart. While aesthetically unpleasing to me, this could make readability of some things difficult. Consider:

Adobe Clean:

1,000,000,000,000 - One billion

2,000,000,000,000 - Two billion

3,000,000,000,000 - Three billion

Folks using Internet Explorer will not see the actual italic Adobe-Clean font, and because (for whatever reason) it just skews the font the character width is consistent. But those using Firefox or Safari (and possibly others), they see a slightly different width in the italics. Maybe that's reasonable for a font for a book, but for high tech work?

Verdana:

1,000,000,000,000 - One billion

2,000,000,000,000 - Two billion

3,000,000,000,000 - Three billion

-Noel

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Noel,

OT - are you using the by the minute "US Debt Clock" there... ?

Hunt

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Yeah, except I don't think I put in enough zeros.

Had a start just now - thought I'd seen something get fixed, in that I was actually seeing Adobe-Clean Italic up above, but then I realized I had just left Firefox running and didn't look at the Title Bar closely enough.

-Noel

Report · Sep 16, 2012

Noel Carboni wrote:
I have attempted to use HTML to format the majority of this post in Verdana.

The easiest way to force formatting into posts is by using an external editor (Word, Illustrator, …), format it the way you like it, then copy/paste it into the forum editor.

P.S. I am using Calibri for this post.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

Hello, Pat, thanks for the tip.

This is just a short sentence to show my reason for prefering Verdana over Arial or Adobe Clear (Verdana). 1 l I.

This is just a short sentence to show my reason for prefering Verdana over Arial or Adobe Clear (Arial). 1 l I.

This is just a short sentence to show my reasons for prefering Verdana over Arial or Adobe Clear (Adobe Clear - I hope; I am seeing Times or the like on screen and I am not sure what will come out after I post). l l I.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

This is just a test to see if posting in the HTML editor makes a difference or not. This is the much maligned Comic Sans.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

Isn’t this the famous Comic Sans? Definitely different from what I see in your message # 19, which looks like Times to my untrained eye.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

You tell me:

It apparently depends on what viewer you are using—or something.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

And your message saying that your scheme seemed to work seems to have vanished in the internet space...

Report · Sep 17, 2012

That was in Safari. Firefox shows me Verdana in that post #19 and in your post #20, Claudio.

Go figure…

Yes, I deleted what had been my post #20 as soon as I saw the different behavior in different browsers.

Report · Sep 17, 2012

This is what Firefox is showing me now: