l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
I think it might be easier to use a serif font. Where are you trying to make this change? At the browser level? OS? Or somewhere else? You should be able to make that change, but the specific configuration will vary.
But even if I fix my computer to properly display I, nobody else will see it.
What other people see is their problem. Plenty of people don’t mind or prefer sans-serif. Ensuring your designs look the same on everyone’s machine has been a problem since the dawn of the Internet, and you aren’t going to solve it by replacing 'I’s with a special character. Worse still, if a user’s font don’t doesn’t include that character, they’ll end up with an ugly ‘�’ or something similar.
You need to decide where you lie on the control vs flexibility spectrum, because currently you want it both ways. You either make static images of text formatted exactly how you want (and adding alt text!!), or you let users view the text as they wish.
I find it really strange how you’ve been confronted with locked down text from Samsung, and your first instinct is to try to inflict that same thing on others.
I don’t understand your confusion. There are three actors: the author, the reader, and the OS (of the reader and the sender).
You are saying readers should have full control, without exactly justifying it.
I’m offering up a counter-proposal that the author should have full control (or at least control of the font).
We had this argument with Mark Twain’s use of n*. If authors intent theoretically matters about a word, why not a font? Though obviously a font is less consequential.
I’m not seriously arguing for author-determined fonts, though (see, again, MySpace), but it is worth considering in passing.
As far Samsung or Microsoft forcing a font on us as users, we can probably agree to be against that.
I’m not confused, I’m telling you you are misguided. As an author, you can suggest a font to use. We do this all the time when building web pages by defining styles for a page, but once it reaches a user’s browser it’s in their control.
If you want more control, you will need to pick a different medium. It sounds like pdf might be what you want?
Well, that’s kinda how it should be, right? People generally don’t have uniform preferences for anything
I imagine you wouldn’t be particularly pleased if someone else decided to go the other way and enforced you using a font where 1liI|!j all looked identical because they wanted that instead for some reason.
Similarly, serifed fonts are regarded as being more readable for most people (though this is apparently also increasingly up for debate), however some dyslexic or neuro-divergent people can apparently really struggle with them compared to alternatives.
You think this is a slam dunk argument, but, yeah, maybe I would be willing to put up with that if I could add serifs to my I’s. The internet is built on consent, no? If they want to force that distinction on me for what they write, I can choose to not read them or to block them.
Sort of by the by, there is a user that goes by IllIllI or somesuch. It is delightfully irritating.
That’s kinda my point though, if someone wanted text to all look a certain way on their devices, someone choosing to work around that for whatever reason is doing so without consent, right? Blocking is a reactive act, rather than consent which is proactive.
If someone came into your house and painted all your walls vomit green because they like the colour better than whatever you’ve currently got, that’s not really just a consent issue is it?
Yeah, that’s approaching the situation on my Samsung tablet. I have to buy fonts from them if I want to change them.
But I’m saying why is my right to present my words they way I want to present them not at all considered? I don’t consent to arial font. Maybe my words are best expressed in Times New Roman.
I know the answer is MySpace–giving people absolute freedom led to absolute chaos…
At the risk of creating a monster, if how your text looks is more important to you than the content itself, I guess you could render all your text to an image and share that. Though, I’d suspect you’d end up in quite a few blocklists because people generally prefer to have their own preferences rather than someone else’s on their own devices.
Regarding the Samsung tablet font situation, a few things:
Firstly why they are sold, commercial fonts kinda generally cost money, I won’t get into how Monotype is basically operating as a cartel, but foundries own the designs of fonts and they license them to operating systems at a cost. Apple and Microsoft bundle the cost of the licenses in with the price of their software/devices, Samsung decided to not do that and pass on the fee to the users that specifically wanted them. Not saying it’s good or anything, just explaining why.
Secondly, doesn’t Samsung offer some free? I’ve not used a Samsung device in years so I might be misremembering, it wasn’t an incredible selection, but there were a few fonts for each of the main typeface categories.
Finally, if there isn’t a current root exploit already for the device, it never used to be too long before someone figured it out. Once that’s possible it was always pretty trivial to add in custom font files IIRC. Have a dive on the XDA forums and see if anyone’s working on your device
I was playing with the idea of taking page from Sxan’s book and inserting the I from the title into my text, then people would be forced to deal with it, even though it would unfortunately wreck the flow because it’s not designed to replace a captial I.
I get why fonts can cost money, but Samsung doesn’t seem to let me install free fonts, which we can agree is BS.
Second, there might be free ones, but it would be tedious to determine which ones have the I I’m looking for… but it’s something i would only have to do once, I guess.
The exploits I’ve seen for the Tab A seem to work for older versions of the firmware, but not the current ones. Maybe if I were willing to mothball the tablet until they caught up, I could manage something, but Samsung forces updates otherwise.