I really like the text rendering on my iPad 3. Yes, it’s ostensibly much the same as the iPhone 4 I’ve had for a while. But it’s not. The relatively huge screen makes a world of difference.
So I’ve changed the font of this ‘ere website to something that looks nicer on the iPad 3. It looks less impressive on pretty much any other device. So get an iPad 3.
Urgh… and then I got really fancy and downloaded Typefaces, so I could find out exactly what fonts are available on an iPad 3 (with iOS 5.1) and choose the best. I ended up narrowing it down to Gill Sans (possibly the Light variant, also), Times New Roman, Verdana and Arial. I ruled out all the others on the basis of dodgy spacing, poor alignment of common symbols (e.g. %, &, @, etc), etc.
Then I found out that the obnoxious Suffusion WordPress theme won’t let you use custom fonts. Only the small set it deems “safe”. The intersection with that brought it down to Times New Roman, Verdana and Arial.
So I tried those three – taking a screenshot of each for comparison – and then studied them. And realised, unhappily, that Times New Roman has stupid spacing around apostrophes. So now it was a showdown between Verdana and Arial, and I felt the tighter spacing of Arial was cleaner.
And then I realised that Arial is the default font, and probably what it was set to before I wrote this post, originally. God damn it.