Fonts

[BevanWeiss]

What do people tend to use for Fonts in their GeoSCADA systems?

I've always been a Tahoma fan.  But just recently I was doing some googling on the most readable fonts, and came across some information suggesting that the likes of Segoe UI are easier to read.

I've tried it, and it's changed my life.  (warning, what comes next will read like a love letter or a sales brochure... your pick).

Segoe UI just appears so much smoother than Arial / Tahoma when used on a ClearText capable setup, which I think is pretty much everything these days.  It has a nice flow to it, nice open glyphs (no excessive hooks on the 'a' or 'e').

In particular the SemiBold weighting gives just that little bit more volume to each glyph than is in the standard Arial / Tahoma fonts, but not the excessive fill that occurs if the Bold weight is applied to either of those other fonts.

My only issues with it so far have been:

1. It has quite a variation in kerning between certain glyphs, which makes it visually distracting when used for things like incrementing timestamps, since the overall text appearance changes quite dramatically on things like the second transition from 0 -> 1.
2. The number 1 vs l vs I has limited differentiators.  For the most part this isn't an issue, I can imagine there may be situations where the I (upper i) and l (lower L) can be more often confused... but here in Australia, not so much.

[sbeadle · Accepted solution]

Hi Bevan, that's a coincidence! I was looking at our UI for some of ViewX and considered whether a switch to Segoe UI might help in some cases. For example, the mimic expression edit box uses Tahoma 8, and it is difficult to distinguish between double quotes and two single quotes. Segoe UI provides some minor difference. For that edit dialog, would this be helpful?

See image here.

[tfranklin]

Funny... 

We recently started overhauling the UI of some of our utilities and Segoe UI is the winner.  It gives the tools a completely different look and feel.  The kerning as you mentioned is a bit concerning though just because the values take up significantly more real-estate.  

We've yet to push this change down to everything, but it'll probably end up being a font family global that we define as a parameter for embeds/expressions to play around with. 

This should allow us to plant easter eggs rather easily. 

    font family:  if username = 'sbeadle' then 'Wingdings'

[BevanWeiss]

@sbeadle I think if you've got more flexibility to deploy a font alongside your platform (like you would with ViewX etc), then there are perhaps better fonts than the out-of-the-box versions.

I think the kerning in Segoe UI would not be desirable for "code" entry situations (which I'd include as the Expression entry fields).

The double/single quote distinction issue does seem to be incredibly prevalent in ClearSCADA/GeoSCADA.  So a font that can nicely distinguish between these would be good.

I'm sure there was a good font for this that I found somewhere... but I just can't find it again now.

Notepad++ seems to do alright with Lucida Sans.

Inconsolata seems really good

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata?preview.text=This+is+a+GeoSCADA+Expression+%27%22%27%2...

Or Source Code Pro 

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro?preview.text=This+is+a+GeoSCADA+Expression+%27%22%...

[BevanWeiss]

@tfranklin The kerning of Segoe UI is quite nice, I find it more compact than an equivalent Tahoma / Arial (as you can see in Steve's comparison dogs..).  But even with the more compact kerning, I still find Segoe UI just 'reads nicer'...