JP said:
For the longest time the "Hotmail" default font was Verdana 10. Now, for
some reason, it defaults to Tahoma 10 which is smaller.
How do I return the default font to Verdana 10?
Start a campaign. Design a web site or use on the social networking
(i.e., ego stroking) web sites, like Facebook. Get a LOT of "friends"
that agree with you. Have those compatriots sign a complaint and submit
it to Microsoft if you ever manage who there to give the complaint. Ask
Microsoft to change their choice regarding how they designed their
webmail client for you to use their free e-mail service.
Or you could what other Hotmail users do, and that is to use the
drop-down list for the down-arrow next to the "?" help icon and select
feedback. Of course, maybe there were lots of users that previously
complained that Verdana was much too wide a font and inserted far too
much whitespace and they wanted a more compressed font. So you pushing
your vote button might not have any effect if there were others that
pushed the other vote button many more times than you.
Verdana has wider characters and also a lot of whitespace between them.
I suspect it is the extra whitespace that you miss. Tahoma is closer to
Arial although I'm not aware that Tahoma is a default fault included in
the installation of all operating systems. If the font isn't available
on the host, a substitute font gets used and that'll be Arial or
Helvetica depending on your OS. The sizing of Tahoma is closer to Arial
much more so than Verdana. With the need to use a substituted font,
layout of a Verdana formatted message would change a lot more
drastically than one written in Tahoma. Of course, Microsoft should've
selected Arial (for a proportional font) or Courier New (for a
monospaced font so columnar data will align).
See:
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/css-font-matching-windows-mac-and-linux
Of course, you're talking about Hotmail, a webmail client that composes
only in HTML format despite that the vast majority of e-mails need
nothing more than plain text (so with Hotmail there is a MIME part for
HTML and text versions to double the size of the message). At one time,
Microsoft didn't even understand that HTML formatted e-mails were
supposed to include a plain text MIME part to ensure a recipient that
couldn't render HTML content could still read the message. Eventually
they added both MIME parts and, of course, doubled the size of the
e-mail. There is an option available using Hotmail's webmail client to
select plain text as the sending format but HTML is the default.
There is no user-configurable option to specify which format to use by
default (as is available in the webmail clients for many other e-mail
providers). You get HTML format as the default because that is what
Microsoft chose for their design. You now get Tahoma as the default
font with no user-configurable option to change it and because, again,
that's also Microsoft choice in their design. You can complain by
sending feedback but you might be fighting a tide of other users that
complained about Verdana as the default font. Verdana wastes a LOT of
space in a document. It is equivalent to kids using double-spaced
typing in their essays to bloat the number of pages to make their report
look bigger.
Since you are asking about using their webmail client, you could change
the zoom setting in your web browser to make text look bigger for
failing or aging eyes. If you always want a different zoom than IE7/8's
default of 125% then go into Internet Options -> Advanced and uncheck
the options "Reset text size ..." and "Reset zoom level ...". Another
choice would be to up the DPI (dots per inch) setting in Windows that
decides how big will be the text on the screen. When you get a bigger
monitor, you are wasting the increased resolution that you paid for if
you let the objects get smaller. With the DPI the same (default is 96%)
but as screen resolution goes up with a larger monitor, objects will get
smaller so their use the same number of dots (plus they get less focused
and often have color tinge artifacts). If you paid for increased
resolution in a larger monitor then use it. Up the DPI setting in
Windows, like to 125%, so the objects remain the same size as before but
now use more dots so they are sharper. Not only will the e-mails in
your web browser look easier to read but so will everything else in
other apps.
