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.
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?