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I would guess number one. Many medical TV ads, after saying how great their product is, often have a disclaimer (how it may in fact harm you) in small low contrast fonts which are on screen for only a few seconds.
I am 80 years old, still writing apps (well sort of), and small font size is always an issue for me.
Bring back punched cards!!
73
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Chris, they're age-ist, twentysomething arsehats who will get their comeuppance when they hit their 40's. In my experience (I'm 62), that's your only hope.
Nobody gives a crap about accessibility issues for anyone over the age of 25.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Oddly, another place this is true is the Android Alarm Clock interface.
Huge canvas with tiny, widely spaced print. For no reason I can think of.
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So, I liked #3 as a great rationalization, and I know Sander’s answer is closest to the truth, but I would have bet that the store manager assigned the task to whomever was working in the bakery - without regard to whether they had any experience at all with computers, labels, fonts, or printing.
That person, after finally getting something to print on the actual label, said “Good enough!”
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events.
- Manly P. Hall
Mark
Just another cog in the wheel
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I wrote label printing software in the late 90s/early 2000s for hardware-type stores, streaming data from the computer's COM port to an RS232 port on the printer. The few label printers we developed for (I remember SATO printers) had "built in" support for specific font types and sizes. If you used any font/size combination not built in then the printer treated it as a graphic rather than text. This slowed the printing down considerably - from 20 or 30 labels per second to 1 label per second. The font sizes supported were strange - if you went up one size it effectively doubled the printed size. To figure out the finished label, you get the max size that would ever be printed per field and play a long game of massaging the various fields' fonts/sizes to get things looking ok. Another problem is the DIP switches on the printer. If not set right it can affect the printing. I'm not saying the food packaging label designers put a lot of thought in, but there might be legitimate reasons. Someone mentioned Bartender software - I used that as well during the discovery phase, but we ditched it for the printing speed of using the built-in fonts.
Mike
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My very first job was writing a printer driver for geo plots on a state-of-the-art printer that used actual pens for printing (as in, it would pick a pen from the rack of pens, draw in that colour, put the pen back. It was mesmerising). I remember spending a lot of time working on getting the font sizes right.
I guess this is what's doing my head in: working out how to measure the width of a piece of text you are about to print is a task that needs to be done once per system. Providing the means to change fonts seems to be definitely already built in (I see different font weights and size in this micro-text). For some reason putting the two together just seems...to hard?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Not quite the explanation here, but what I know ...
We have auto bagging machines here at the building I work in. The bags are printed with all the art work in a generic format, and come on a roll of 5000. When we designed the bag artwork, we left ourselves a 2" by 4" space to print the product name, specs, UPC Barcode, customer logo, etc. As time passed, we had to print more legal stuff in the print area, and the printing got smaller for some text, and increased the size of the barcode, so it scans on every barcode scanner you can imagine.
So these auto baggers, feed a bag into the plenum, blow air into the bag to open it, and dump product into it by weight, and seal the bag, then tear and dump into a bin.
We can't make the print area larger, because were limited by the heat thermal transfer head size that prints the information. We can't buy a larger one, because the ones we have match the entire system, where we use RS232 to download the data to the thermal heat thermal transfer print head.
To print larger, we would have to buy all brand new equipment, which is not cost effective.
I know with major bread brands, they can afford to have a custom bag printed for each bread type, because they only offer White and Wheat. They just auto bag, and print the factory number, batch number, UPC Barcode, and expiration date in a specified area.
I first saw tiny print 30 years ago coming from Asia, with products such as Sony, Toshiba, etc, because they tried to print in 5 different languages on the same sheet of paper designed for a single market place. But now they can consolidate that one product, and ship it to many market places, such as the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe.
Hope that helps ...
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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Do you mind if I ask Why does Firefox not like your link "View My Work"
I am not being critical just trying to understand what Firefox is doing
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Don't know yet. I just renewed my SSL certificate, and maybe I got it wrong. I tested it from home, and I didn't get any warnings, so I'm not sure yet. On Firefox IOS, says connection secure. Kind of stupid that I buy a 5 year certificate, and I have to regenerate it every year for 5 years, on like June 11. I went to generate it this year, and forgot how to do it, and messed up, and had to do it again, so maybe that's it.
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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Here is what I see FYI Thanks for the reply
Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at codename-indigo.com.
If you entered the right address, you can:
Try again later
Check your network connection
Check that Firefox has permission to access the web (you might be connected but behind a firewall)
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I took that website down years ago, back in 2018 I think, and replaced it with my new Code Project Footer "Discover my world at" @ jkirkerx.com right after that. I remember Chris giving me a hard time about the how Code Project writes the footers in real time, to what ever the footer is at the moment you post, so you can't change the footer in all your posts at one time. Strange that your seeing that.
Codename Indigo was a failed project, where I attempted to make ecommerce technology in Microsoft .Net with MVC using views, and then discovered Angular and went that direction instead, and got stumped in Mar of 2020, when I decided to outsource this technology to Ebay and Amazon to see how they do it. After that, my online business took off to heights I never imagined to be possible, and is the source if my income,
But my jkirkerx.com did actually generate some good leads, that turned into huge projects lasting for years. But soon, jkirkerx.com will change again, after my trademarks with USPTO get approved so I can go to the next level of marketing with my online business and code business.
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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And while we're at it, what about contrast? As in, grey letters on a black background are cool, right? So let's make it the darkest possible grey so it is as cool as it can be.
That is somehow worse, since someone put thought into making it that way.
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I too despise the way they (manufacturers) handle this however you have to keep in mind that there are always government regulations, sometimes at multiple levels, that have to be followed. I imagine what they put on them is required and the text has to fit and sometimes on something small. This of course doesn't explain this for other products that have larger containers but I imagine the same machine(s) are used to do the text regardless of the packaging (regardless of it's size) and so instead of changing up font sizes they leave it as is using whatever is the smallest font that works on all products they make. Plants that produce the boxes/packaging used to box up and ship just about anything don't have different machines for each container size/type they make. They will typically have a few going and each will make 1 or more batches of a specific box/container and then they switch the machine up to do another type of box/container.
You can bet that the majority of them would rather you not read any of that info (there are a few more health conscious companies that do want you to read that stuff). There's way too many different sized and shaped containers to have a separate machine making each one.
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I'm voting for number one; they don't want me to read the label.
The teeny tiniest print I find is for the ingredients list on cat food cans, where I want to know if it has actual fish in it or just guar gum and crab shells.
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Its not just food. WD "My passport" serial number is so small a magnifying glass barley helped. Amazon receipt allowed me to get the right string - too bad WD registration splotch app still said was bad Id - just make things so small no one will ever get them right and corps will never have a liability to support stuff (as if it mattered) - also a piece of crap db lookup to confirm correct makes it set in stone like the mafia with cement galoshes
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Chris Maunder wrote: in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it.
At least for food the required number of items that must be on a food label have increased. Like whether there are nuts or processed where nuts might have been used in something else.
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Wordle 780 5/6
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Wordle 780 4/6
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Wordle 780 4/6*
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Wordle 780 6/6
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Wordle 780 5/6
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Wordle 780 5/6*
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"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Wordle 780 6/6*
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Don't ask 
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Wordle 780 3/6
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“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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