3 ms·

My god, programmer typography! It's like the author only just discovered font weigths. The only possible defence for using bold allcaps five times in a paragrap

My god, programmer typography! It's like the author only just discovered font weigths. The only possible defence for using bold allcaps five times in a paragraph is if it is a name that is being typeset that way. here there is no such defence and the author deploys a further five instances of bold italics in the very first paragraph, the one small mercy being not deploying any bold all caps underline or making itrain typefaces. I honesty felttired just looking at that text.

kelnos 9y ago
I know this is meta, and generally frowned upon, but can we please discuss content rather than presentation? Ranting about presentation does not change anything or meaningfully add to the discussion. As an aside: I love how you're criticizing, but in your post made (at least) one spelling error ("weigths"), missed a space between two words ("felttired"), missed capitalizing the first word of a sentence ("here"), and spelled/spaced two words differently ("allcaps" and "all caps"). (Also I'm not sure if "itrain" is a word; Google didn't help in deciphering that one.) Pot/kettle/black.
- setr 9y ago
  tbf the topic is "Typographical Analysis" If the author displays a weakness in a Typographical practice/understanding, it's difficult to continue believing his "analysis" has real value; it would obviously be limited to at the very least those shown weaknesses, as well as the set of weaknesses we haven't yet seen. And when the shown fault is at the basics of typographical best practice, then it is likely not worth reading any of the analysis; any statement used is likely a misunderstanding of the real properties of it. And given that this is targeted at people not well-versed in typography, then it is probably a case of a novice teaching a novice, and thus any presented understanding is likely, at best, a poor understanding of the subject, and at worst, incorrect. When discussing typography, I think its pretty fair to judge the presentation as well as the content, since its a metric of their authority on the subject matter. Not fair, however, is that the grandparent's subject is typography, and afaik, your criticism is not related to typography. Particularly in that in the article is very distinctly edited to use typographical "features", and fails to use them well (imo), a result of misunderstanding the properties of the features; whereas the grandparent is very distinctly not edited, and clearly a result of typing too fast. The grandparent is not thinking about typography in his presentation; The article is. So the article can be judged (it tried and failed), whereas the grandparent can really only be criticized for a lack of caring in the first place.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    The author isn't really discussing typography as the main focus, though. He is talking about handwriting, and how it could possibly relate to typography. I'm not trying to be picky or pedantic here; I think the distinction is actually important. He need not be an expert in typography (or even display good sense in presentation around typographic elements) to take a look at his handwriting and find inconsistencies between it and some common metrics used in typography. One need not even agree with his conclusion/belief that you can make your handwriting better by post-processing it to make it have consistent letter spacing, line heights, etc. I think just the idea of doing those comparisons is interesting, and one is free to draw their own conclusions. Just the idea of making those comparisons made it a worthwhile read to me, because I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Sure, you can disagree that it was a worthwhile read for you, but that doesn't make it somehow ok to trash the guy's article like the great-grandparent did. I think what I'm getting at boiled down, is this: be nice. The original author had an idea about something, looked into it, and wrote up some of his findings and opinions. You can disagree with those opinions, or even the methodology around the findings, and it's fine to express that disagreement, but the great-grandparent did so in a fundamentally rude way, which I think is well beneath HN's standards for quality, respectful discourse. It amounted to little more than an ad hominem attack.
manibatra 9y ago
I did just learn about typography. And it was a conscious decision to just go all out and I did debate whether to keep it the way it is as it was looking at times all over the place. I just wanted to try something different. I promise I will learn.

kelnos 9y ago

I know this is meta, and generally frowned upon, but can we please discuss content rather than presentation? Ranting about presentation does not change anything or meaningfully add to the discussion. As an aside: I love how you're criticizing, but in your post made (at least) one spelling error ("weigths"), missed a space between two words ("felttired"), missed capitalizing the first word of a sentence ("here"), and spelled/spaced two words differently ("allcaps" and "all caps"). (Also I'm not sure if "itrain" is a word; Google didn't help in deciphering that one.) Pot/kettle/black.

setr 9y ago
tbf the topic is "Typographical Analysis" If the author displays a weakness in a Typographical practice/understanding, it's difficult to continue believing his "analysis" has real value; it would obviously be limited to at the very least those shown weaknesses, as well as the set of weaknesses we haven't yet seen. And when the shown fault is at the basics of typographical best practice, then it is likely not worth reading any of the analysis; any statement used is likely a misunderstanding of the real properties of it. And given that this is targeted at people not well-versed in typography, then it is probably a case of a novice teaching a novice, and thus any presented understanding is likely, at best, a poor understanding of the subject, and at worst, incorrect. When discussing typography, I think its pretty fair to judge the presentation as well as the content, since its a metric of their authority on the subject matter. Not fair, however, is that the grandparent's subject is typography, and afaik, your criticism is not related to typography. Particularly in that in the article is very distinctly edited to use typographical "features", and fails to use them well (imo), a result of misunderstanding the properties of the features; whereas the grandparent is very distinctly not edited, and clearly a result of typing too fast. The grandparent is not thinking about typography in his presentation; The article is. So the article can be judged (it tried and failed), whereas the grandparent can really only be criticized for a lack of caring in the first place.
- kelnos 9y ago
  The author isn't really discussing typography as the main focus, though. He is talking about handwriting, and how it could possibly relate to typography. I'm not trying to be picky or pedantic here; I think the distinction is actually important. He need not be an expert in typography (or even display good sense in presentation around typographic elements) to take a look at his handwriting and find inconsistencies between it and some common metrics used in typography. One need not even agree with his conclusion/belief that you can make your handwriting better by post-processing it to make it have consistent letter spacing, line heights, etc. I think just the idea of doing those comparisons is interesting, and one is free to draw their own conclusions. Just the idea of making those comparisons made it a worthwhile read to me, because I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Sure, you can disagree that it was a worthwhile read for you, but that doesn't make it somehow ok to trash the guy's article like the great-grandparent did. I think what I'm getting at boiled down, is this: be nice. The original author had an idea about something, looked into it, and wrote up some of his findings and opinions. You can disagree with those opinions, or even the methodology around the findings, and it's fine to express that disagreement, but the great-grandparent did so in a fundamentally rude way, which I think is well beneath HN's standards for quality, respectful discourse. It amounted to little more than an ad hominem attack.

manibatra 9y ago

I did just learn about typography. And it was a conscious decision to just go all out and I did debate whether to keep it the way it is as it was looking at times all over the place. I just wanted to try something different. I promise I will learn.