The look of this blog when viewed on a Windows machine has always subtly annoyed me. I’ve been using the default font setup for WordPress, which uses Lucida Grande first, and if that is not available it uses Verdana. Verdana to me looks, I don’t know, thin or stretched or something. Loose. Unfortunately most Windows boxes don’t come with Lucida Grande, so Verdana is what most people experience. Today I decided to do something about it.

It’s possible now to tell a broswer to load a font from the Web when displaying a particular page. I could quite easily put @font-face directives in my files, load copies of Lucida Grande onto the server, and I’d be done (except for Internet Explorer, and those people can get by with Verdana). Unfortunately, although technically pretty simple, that course of action would not be legal.

There’s a font on Windows called Lucida Sans Unicode (or something like that) which is very similar to Lucida, but is not nearly as good for italics and bold face. This will be my fall-back solution.

For a while today, however, I thought I might go look for a new font, something that caught the spirit of this blog, yet was easy to read on a screen and had a nice ink density. On top of that, it had to be free or at least reasonably priced, and it had to include good italic and bold versions, and it had to include the wacky Czech diacriticals for those few episodes where I use them, plus the full range of punctuation including a variety of dashes, copyright symbols, and stuff like that.

I came up empty. Making a good font is not at all simple, and the people who make the great ones quite understandably want to be paid for their work. If I found one that measured up to Lucida Grande in usefulness and that would give this site a unique feel, I might be tempted to pony up.

The closest thing I could find was a font called Liberation, which is a favorite in the Linux world. At this writing, those without Lucida Grande will see that font (unless you’re using Internet Explorer). It’s OK, but the text is actually a little smaller for the same font size. That certainly is annoying. I haven’t looked at the text on enough different screens to know for sure, but I think right now the lettering is too small.

How’s it looking for you, my windows-using readers? Do you have any favorite fonts? I think with screen resolutions improving, it’s even possible to consider a serifed font these days.