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Currently, the site uses the Google font Lusitana for most of the content. This has the disadvantage that there is no native italic, resulting in a faux italic which is — bluntly — ugly.

Screenshot of faux italic

Would it possible to change to a font which has a real italic? Google provide Crimson Text which is similar to Lusitana but has a real italic:

![Screenshot of real italic

It may be necessary to play a little with the spacing: it certainly looks better slightly more widely spaced than the current setting for Lusitana.

It does appear that Crimson Text behaves better at small sizes on Windows rendering (see the x in text in this comment):

Comment in Lusitana Comment in Crimson Text

A full-size image of my answer set in Crimson Text is available on imgur — to avoid any artefacts from squishing images inside this column of text. It does appear that Crimson Text renders better on Windows than Lusitana does. If it's thought that Lusitana might be improved upon, it may be worthwhile looking at changing the sans-serif font as well.

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  • A five-live user script would fix this.
    – user3961
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 5:14
  • See also this discussion on BH.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2018 at 22:47

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I would fully support this. Lusitana was not a good font pick for many reasons. Italics is only one of its issues. It's probably worth working up a list of them to convince SE to take the change seriously.

Crimson Text is certainly a good candidate. It has a fairly complete character and feature set, good legibility, and a feel that people are pretty comfortable reading (I've used it to typeset everything from 400 page books to mobile web pages to pretty good reviews).

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  • 1
    OK... Lack of italics (and bold italics); rendering under Windows; is there anything else?
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 11:57
  • 3
    @AndrewLeach Lusitana doesn't have smart quotes.
    – Nathaniel is protesting Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 12:05
  • 1
    The inconsistent letter height is quite annoying. wxxw
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 12:17
  • 3
    Hmm. It doesn't do Greek. That might be a disadvantage. And that image also shows something odd happening with italic f.
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 22:35
  • 1
    Noto Serif might be better. And that comes with a Sans version too.
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 22:43
  • Cardo could be a good option, I use it when I need Greek and Hebrew. There is an italic Latin version too.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 2:34
  • Noto doesn't have a serifed Hebrew script.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 2:37
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Inconsistent letter heights

inconsistent t height
enter image description here

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The bold is also very muddy looking, and is especially poorly hinted in headings:

samples from the Christianity site

Probably a more generic font stack would be fine.

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  • 1
    I presume that the bold is muddy because it’s being emulated, just as the "italics" are by emulated by digital distortion. That never looks anything but bad.
    – tchrist
    Commented Sep 2, 2018 at 16:25

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