The Font That Makes This Article Easier to Read

I got the chance to indulge in font selection because I wrote some code to convert Medium stories to Markdown. Having generated HTML from the Markdown text, I was then faced with the problem of adding CSS styles to the HTML.

I decided to copy the Medium look, until I get better ideas. Medium uses ITC Charter. The closest free font I could find was PT Serif from Google Web Fonts.

But PT Serif still left me dissatisfied. I liked Charter better. Low-cost licensing options for the ITC Charter font (e.g., one-time fee of $29) seemed to have unreasonable limitations like 100k page views per month. What if some article of mine goes viral? :)

After a bit of searching, I was very pleased to discover that a version of Charter, Bitstream Charter, was donated under generous terms back in 1992. Some good samaritans have converted those old Charter font files to modern web font formats. And they work in 2016-era browsers!

I’m using 1992 Bitstream Charter on my blog. Retro cool FTW.

I love the way Charter looks. It’s a little lighter than PT Serif. Major props to Medium for good taste. To my eyes, on my Retina Macbook, legibility improved quite significantly going from PT Serif to Charter. Perhaps screen screen pixel densities are finally high enough that lighter fonts can still be legible.

It’s hard to convey the difference in legibility using only screenshots because the differences aren’t very clear when zoomed, or if the image become blurred due to scaling. Instead, I made two pages with the same content: article typeset in Charter and article typeset in PT Serif. See for yourself.

I am super-pleased with Charter for body text. For headings, I’m keeping it simple and using Helvetica. I may revisit this in the future.