For reasons that probably made sense at the time (not that they were good reasons, just that they made sense) someone chose to use Marker Felt as the font for Notes on the iPhone and carried that over to the iPad. I dunno why exactly, as it's ugly and, worse, illegible at small sizes, but whatever. You also can't change it, which is doubly nasty. Yeah, I suppose font pickers are a bad thing in general and I can understand wanting to keep them away from the general user most of the time, but if you're going to do that you should choose a font that really doesn't suck.
Thankfully there's a way to get legible text out of Notes.
You need to enable the Japanese keyboard in the general settings. Once you do that, typing any single character off any of the japanese keyboards will flip the entire note over to use Helvetica. (I found this out by accident as it's really easy to switch keyboards) Doesn't matter how much text you've typed, and you can delete the japanese character without causing the note to shift back.
Yes, this is a horrible, nasty hack. It's lame and you shouldn't have to do it go get legible text, but it does work and if you happen to have the japanese keyboards enabled anyway it's even essentially effort-free.
Posted by Dan at April 12, 2010 07:47 AM | TrackBack (0)