These typefaces are so great. He's actually one-upped Readability, which uses H&FJ faces exclusively, and makes hay of that. H&FJ is one of the great typography design houses in the world, but the net result of Readability's implementation is... quirky; nobody in the world wants to read large amounts of body text set in Vitesse!<p>(And I love Vitesse; it's my slide deck font now.)<p>Marco wrote a blog post recently saying he had trouble getting responses from type designers, but what he managed to pull off here is a survey of some of the best reading faces in the world, ranging from venerable (FF Meta) to brand new (Elena).
It looks like Readability doesn't quite like this new feature in Instapaper. From Timothy Meaney, part of Arc90, parent company of Readability:<p>@marcoarment congrats Marco, great idea out of nowhere to up your game re: typography. Out of nowhere!!<p>Interesting, considering Readabilty's app is a complete ripoff of the one-man-company Instapaper.
Marco,
Hope you're reading this.<p>Yes, the fonts are great. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but on IPad3 with Elena font only while in landscape only, capitals are distorted/thin. It's fine in every other font with both portrait and landscape orientations.<p>Good Characters:
BCDNST<p>Bad Characters:
EFHIJKLUVY<p>Otherwise, no doubt, these fonts are beautiful, and the twilight sepia is a welcome addition, since I use F.lux generally on all my systems. Great release Marco!
That's impressive. He stated less than 24 hours ago that it would take 7-10 days [1]. I guess both Marco and Apple are working around the clock.<p>1. <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad</a>
The new default iOS font Elena is really gorgeous. There's a few example retina images in TFA that show you how many more pixels the new ipad has then my (and possibly your) display.
I'm actually quite disappointed that, while Marco added three new fonts (that's great), he completely removed the ability to use the standard system fonts, at least on my iPhone version!<p>The fact is, Times New Roman and Helvetica are two of the greatest typefaces of all time both for legibility, and for "receding into the background", so that you notice the content, not the font. Just because they're tremendously overused doesn't make them any less legible.<p>And while Elena, Lyon and Tisa are not terrible, all of them impose far more typographical personality on the text than I'd rather have. And for an app that people may spend an hour a day reading on, the choice of typeface is actually tremendously important. For me, Elena is just too boxy and spindly, with overlong serifs; Lyon's letterforms just need further work and refinement (the lowercase 'f' has too large of a hook, and feels like it's going to topple over to the right; the commas draw too much attention to themselves because of their size, etc.), and Tisa is just too casual, without enough variation between thick and thin strokes.<p>So please, Marco, bring back Times New Roman, Palatino, and Helvetica as additional options!
Sad that he feels the need to be so publicly thankful of the App Review team.<p>A sane policy would recognize that he's a popular iOS developer in good-standing, and would not submit him to any review process.
The fonts look pretty great on my iPhone 4. (Though I miss my favorite face from iBooks, Iowan.) Unfortunately, they look very strange on my iPad 1. Uneven and partly washed out.