fighting with fonts

Fonts are something I've been battling with for about 30 years. Maybe slightly longer.

Based on customer reviews I've read, some who buy the Garmin Drive 53 think it's too small as a 5" screen. I know it's not because I use it myself. Bear in mind I also own a DriveSmart 76 that has a 7" screen.

The perceived smallness of the 53 isn't because of physical size. It's the font.

I'll talk about Windows 11 in a moment which is its own can of worms, but if you compare the 53 to the old nuvi 50 from the early 2010s, you would be shocked at how much more legible the 50 is.

That 50, even though a 5" and a matte screen, has legibility that outdoes 7" screens and all smartphones. Yes, all of them.

Why? Bright, daylight readable screen, and the font used. I don't know the name of the font, but it's the near-equivalent of the most legible font ever used in Microsoft Windows, Verdana.

It takes a 7" navigator to almost equal the legibility of the 5" nuvi 50. Yes, I said almost. The 50 is absolutely top dog.

You'll be left scratching your head as to why a 5" outdoes a 7" screen, because people think a physically larger screen means better legibility. Nope. If the font is done wrong, you're not going to be able to read that display no matter what.

The 50's font is big, wide, and ideal for automotive use. In addition, the top left arrow and distance indicator is white with thick black outline against a dark green field. And the map acts the same way with its route arrow. That's perfection.

With Garmin's modern UI for the Drive/DriveSmart, gone is that wonderful Verdana-like font, replaced with a more difficult-to-read skinny Arial type. The font size also got smaller, and that nice black font outline is gone from the top left field as well.

Garmin could, if they wanted to, add in a simple option to the Drive/DriveSmart UI settings to increase or decrease font size. Or better yet, add in the ability to change size and/or BOLD the font. That's never happened, and I doubt it ever will, because that would just make too much sense.

UI designers don't seem to realize that everybody hates skinny fonts with glyphs that smash into each other.

Remember how in Windows you used to be able to change the menu font size and bold (or even italicize) it if you wanted to? And remember how that DID NOT affect the font sizes in programs? That's been gone for years. All you have now in Windows 11 from Accessibility > Text Size is one slider to increase/decrease the global system font. Can you change that font? Nope! Can you bold that font? Nope! You get a slider bar that affects the system font that you can't change system wide, which includes programs. This means increasing the font size increases it everywhere, including places you don't want the font size increased. Lovely, eh? That's modern UI hell.

Modern UI hell is also in all smartphones. It absolutely does not matter how large your phone screen is, nor how high of a resolution it has. Your font is going to be skinny garbage that looks like a family-sized bucket of ass no matter what. Can you change the font? Yes. Your other choices will be other skinny font garbage. Regardless of what you pick, it will be nothing more than different flavors of ass.

"Glyphs that smash into each other" is exactly what happens when the font is too skinny. The skinniness refers to both line thickness and glyph width. Verdana or its Linux equivalent DejaVu Sans does not have this problem whatsoever. Glyphs are wide, dots over lowercase letters i and j are easily seen, bold truly means bold, and the font is good. Take away the glyph width and go skinny, and the font is bad, style be damned.

What glyph smashing does is make a font appear to "vibrate". You could have perfect 20/20 vision and that crap will still happen with a glyph-smasher font, effectively ruining usability.

"But 'crispness' of a font counts!", you may argue. Nope.

Using a watch as an example, some men purposely buy Seiko diver watches because the hour indices are big dots or thick sticks, the hands are thick, and one of the two hands will be an arrow, depending on model. Legibility is guaranteed, and you will never confuse one hand with the other. If the watch had skinny hands, that's a no-go because legibility is ruined. At certain times of the day, the hands would "blur" together.

It doesn't get any more "crispy" for appearance than an analog watch dial, and if THAT has issues with skinny hands screwing up legibility, what makes you think a skinny glyph-smasher font would be any better on an electronic display? I'll answer that for you. It's not.

"Get your eyes checked" is not a valid argument.

The reason I know this isn't a valid argument is because I've seen proper user interfaces that use the correct fonts, and know that the trash offered today is vastly inferior.

Some devices, such as the old Garmin nuvi 50, got it right the first time.

With my phone, I've had my fights with it. I found a way to bold the fonts on the home screen, and wow, that wasn't easy. What I have isn't great, but at least it's than the awful skinny font trash look it had by default. Fortunately, my texting app does have its own individual font settings. Being that's what I read most, at least that's taken care of.

When it comes to the operating system I use, Linux saved the day.

Were I using Windows 11, I would have to buy a physically larger monitor (probably a 27" display size) just to compensate for the lack of font customization in modern Windows.

Since I'm using Linux, I was able to keep using my existing 24" monitor. All that was required were a few minor font size tweaks here and there that Windows USED to have, but were taken away.

It's probably possible to tweak Windows 11 to get the font settings/sizes I'd want with registry edits. But that's not really a solution, is it?

It used to be true that to tweak Linux font settings, you had to manually edit complicated configuration files, but that's no longer the case since it's all in the GUI. Now it's Windows where you have to do complicated registry edits to get the fonts how you want whereas you didn't have to do that before.

Funny how the script flipped like that.

Published 2025 Nov 13