Tiny fonts need alias

The smoothing out of fonts, called anti-aliasing, makes them look better on screen. But anti-aliasing turns out to be a bad thing at very small font sizes.

Fonts in the 8 point and under range look better "aliased". But merely turning off anti-aliasing for a font doesn't do the trick. You actually need special fonts created for use at what I call "squint print" size.

A recent "Design View" newsletter article from Sitepoint, "Tiny Typefaces - Five Fine, Free Fonts," gives examples and more details. (You can subscribe and get their newsletters by email or just periodically check out their web site.)

Googlers may want to search for "free tiny font." For the squintiest of "squint print", try the diminutive 4pt "Tiny" font at a very punny site, "I Shot the Serif". Hmm ... I hope lawyers -- those purveyors of fine print -- don't read this blog.

Another choice, especially for display of code, is one of the Proggy fonts, designed by and for coders.

Compare fonts on-screen

The Typesetter web site is itself a great utility. You can choose up to three fonts, specify all kinds of attributes such as size, word space, background and foreground color and then see the results on-screen in regular, bold, italic, and bold italic.

This is superb for deciding which fonts are more easily readable or have the desired emotional effect you are looking for.

Fonts' anatomy

Sitepoint has a good couple of pages explaining the basics about fonts and those that look nice on-screen. The world of print is greatly different from the web world in many respects. Resolution is one big difference. Another aspect to consider is the x-height of fonts. A small x-height will make the on-screen text harder to read. In that respect, Georgia will be easier to read than Times New Roman, for example.

Here's a few common fonts that were especially designed for on-screen viewing:

• Trebuchet MS
• Georgia
• Verdana

One last aspect is the content of your site. A church site probably won't want to use a freaky font like "Chiller", for example, and even Comic Sans MS might not convey the right image.

Read more about "The Anatomy of Web Fonts"