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I have the same feeling about Calibri. When someone just picks whatever font came with MS Word/PowerPoint, it just makes me judge all the other decisions that they made in the project.

Maybe it's just me, but it genuinely disgusts me to see Calibri because it's not crispt and has some of the worst curvatures I've seen on a font.



Calibri has a reasonably large character set and is relatively "compact" in terms of optical size/metric. Not trying to say it's the best typeface for any given application but if you want something metric compatible, with a large character set, your options are somewhat limited (or have been until relatively recently). Many typefaces that are functionally similar in character representation, etc. are more open and take up more space.


Interesting - I feel that way about Times new Roman, and Tahoma (the previous 2 default Word fonts), but I find Calibri quite pleasant!

Out of curiousity, what are sensible basic fonts for documents that you would recommend instead? (Something meant to be read for 1-6 pages of content, not presented in powerpoint slides)


Intersting - I used to feel that way about Times New Roman too, but gradually grown to like it for its compatcness.

I tyically use LateX fonts for formal documents:

https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-to-make-word-documents-l...

For less formal documents, I tent to use Helvetica/Inter/Calisto MT/Constantia and a bunch of others that I collected over the years.


It's the default typeface for Office products since the 2007 release. So they just didn't pick anything better


Calibri was part of a family of "C" fonts released together as the ClearType Font Collection.

- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/cleartype/clear-...

- https://typographica.org/on-typography/microsofts-cleartype-...


I heard it's going to change in the next release (or maybe it did already).


[flagged]


Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how strongly someone feels about a font.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I'm not attacking them. My expression is genuine. It sounds horrible to feel such strongly negative feelings from something like this and I hope they find a way to reduce their suffering.


Typography is a literal profession. Like, one that's older than computing. It's a serious art form. What you're saying is akin to saying feeling disgust at awful programs is bad.


Professional artists will be the first to tell you that there's no such thing as good or bad art. There's only art that you like right here and right now, art that moves you today but not tomorrow, that speaks to you but not your neighbor. It's why we can keep making more without ever running out.


You should hear what Pat Metheny had to say about Kenny G!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-mjt1ypiF8


You're speaking for "professional artists" like it's a monolithic class. There are many of them that claim "Art is subjective!" is pseudointellectual.


This led to a cool question, what objectively little, unimportant thing can get you bent out of shape?

Hearing people chew their food.


For me it's someone opens a jar or other food container with a seal -- like the little layer of plastic of foil between the lid and the food -- and instead of removing the seal completely, they just peel it back enough to get at the food. When they're done the put the cap back on, leaving the next person to deal with the flap of seal clinging uselessly to the top of the container. This drives utterly bonkers, grossly out of proportion with the two seconds it requires for me to finish the job. Fortunately, I am well aware this is a me problem, not a them problem.


But if the seal is laid back down it can act as an additional barrier to air, potentially making the food last longer.


> But if the seal is laid back down it can act as an additional barrier to air, potentially making the food last longer.

More than likely, you've touched the inside of the seal, and by laying it back down you've made accidental contamination of the jar's contents very easy.

You might as well double dip (which is my pet peeve, along with variations like reusing the knife you're spreading mayo with to get more mayo out of the jar).


That’s my wife’s argument. But I don’t believe it has any effect at all.


What type of criminal leaves the seal attached?!


It's embarrassingly hard for me to not go on a rant when people use the same term to refer to assembling and compiling, and try to equate a compiler with an assembler.


But the question was about little things, not utter travesties.


As long as you dont object to people chewing with their mouths open, and instead put in ear-plugs or goto another room or something. It's a scientific fact that tastebuds are more effective in the presence of air, (half of the culinary arts is about getting more air into food)

If you complain about people chewing with their mouths open then you are attempting to objectively reduce their enjoyment of their meal because of your weird personal irrational ism.


Yes, it's called living in a society


I know... I'm trying to be more accepting and not get irritated by such things. It may sound silly to get annoyed by a font, but the perfectionist inside of me just can't accept picking the most available font. I actually spend a lot of time choosing/researching fonts for my slides and documents.


> but the perfectionist inside of me just can't accept picking the most available font

This strikes me as significant misattribution. There's nothing imperfect about picking a default font because there's no such thing as perfection in design, only individual preferences which change from person to person, context to context, and year to year.


> I actually spend a lot of time choosing/researching fonts for my slides and documents.

A massive waste of time.


>the perfectionist inside of me

>Maybe it's just me, but it genuinely disgusts me to see Calibri because it's not crispt and has some of the worst curvatures I've seen on a font.

>crispt

As a perfectionist who admits to getting wrapped around the axle about inconsequential things like font choices, do typos make you similarly upset?


Maybe it's because I just watched all of those SNL skits but this cracked me up. Hopefully GP was being satirical.


Depends on the context. In a book, yes. On the internet, not that much.




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