That said, I as a news designer I believe there to be conventional reasons for using, for example, sans serifs for headlines and serifs for large blocks of body text.
Great article, thanks for the link. I like how the conclusion is that it basically doesn't matter, but by all means use what seems to be the preferred choice for the target audience and/or aesthetic considerations.
By the way, what is it with all these people (in the comments) misspelling "Arial" as "Ariel"? They don't misspell any of the other fonts (ok I saw one person write "Veranda"), is it some kind of in-joke? Or is it people that don't have Arial installed and never see the word in their font listings? (in which case I'm not too sure on their opinions about it, particularly since it requires quite the expert eye to distinguish it from the beloved Helvetica)
What's a word where that is a problem? In coding it would be a problem, but I don't use sans-serif flexible width fonts when writing code.
Edit: asking a question == downvote. I never said it wasn't a problem. Spending more time on lobste.rs anyway, this place is declining at breakneck speeds.
As someone who spent embarrassingly long trying to log in to a system one afternoon because I was misreading an "l" as an "I", I can say that it does sometimes matter - it doesn't need to be in the same word.
Then again, since you set the challenge - lamb and Iamb
I can see no good reason for us to ever use the same symbol to represent two different letters, that's just silly business.
Edit: for the record, I didn't downvote you. Interestingly enough, I just noticed that it looks as though I can no longer downvote direct replies to my comments. Seems like a reasonable rule to have in place.
It's not just about words. Written media is no longer limited to a few basic structures and voices. Grammar needs to be able to shift away from English in-line while maintaining semantic clarity, and sometimes that means the reader needs to distinguish between graphemes without any of the typical contextual cues that classic written languages provide.
The most common issue is hand-copying a piece of text between devices, such as a cryptocurrency address or a URL. Sure, it would be great if those sorts of non-linguistic bits of information were always tagged appropriately such that they show up in a different font, but that rarely happens in reality. Even here, on Hacker News, we can only talk in plaintext with a few minor markup features.
A general-purpose web font should be able to handle a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strings and not choke up on edge cases. In that respect, I really like the differentiation between a capital I and a lowercase L in Clear Sans, no matter the inclusion of 'Sans' in its name.
