italics font is difficult to read (cursive-like)

Question

I'm not sure if this is happening for everyone or if it depends on the browser/OS/etc, but I find it really difficult to read italicized Ukrainian on stackexchange because many of the italic letters are much closer to the cursive, which is very different from the normal letter forms and really confusing to read for beginners.

E.g. from Casual response to "What time is it?", here's a non-italicized and italicized version (plus an italicized screenshot in case your fonts are different):

• Зараз, двадцять перша година, сорок п'ять хвилин.
• Зараз, двадцять перша година, сорок п'ять хвилин.
• 

I understand that the italicized version isn't wrong, but it's really confusing and hard to read for people not used to the alphabet and its cursive (who I think there are many of on this site), and my understanding is that an italicized font that doesn't do this would also be correct. So, would it be possible to change to a font that doesn't change the letter forms so much when italicized? Or possibly to encourage people to use italics less often? (Other solutions to the problem are also welcome.)

Answer 1

Using Italic font for discussed words seems a standard on Linguistic forums and on language-related StackExchage sites. Compare:

One should answer you are welcome for thank you and no problem for sorry.
One should answer you are welcome for thank you and no problem for sorry.

Abandoning the Italic would require another tool (like quotation marks) for inline markup of discussed words. Negotiate it. Convince those who disagree (and those who will disagree in the future). Finally, enforce it somehow. Patrol the site editing someone else's posts.

In other words, it's quite a task.

---

Another solution is to modify your browser.

Stack Exchange's default font is defined as:

-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI Adjusted", "Segoe UI",
"Liberation Sans", sans-serif

I believe it is a result of a long history of trial and error, and we have to have really good reasons to override it (and know exactly what we want instead). Some SE sites, indeed, have another default font. Anyway, if you are on Windows, Segoe UI seems to be the offender.

Here's how your post looks like in RSS reader I'm using:

Here, the default font is overridden and defined as:

Verdana, sans-serif

And I believe this is what you may need.

So, your goal is to change the default font for ukrainian.stackexchange.com and ukrainian.meta.stackexchange.com.

There are various addons/plugins for different browsers to do the job. I'm using Stylish for Mozilla Firefox. Frankly, I have not checked it for this very problem, but the stylesheet seems to be fairly straightforward:

.s-prose {
    font-family: Verdana, sans-serif !important;
}