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KernType – A Kerning Game
- RandallBrown 7y agoPretty fun. Very easy, but fun nonetheless.
- kccqzy 7y agoNice game. But I find it frustrating not to be able to drag the last character. My experience is that well-kerned text takes up overall less horizontal space than unkerned text (i.e. most kerning adjustments are negative), so I'm not sure why this game doesn't allow me to change that overall width.
- wyattpeak 7y agoIt might just be an accommodation for people who know little about typography. I couldn't have done it if I'd been able to adjust the overall length because I had no intuition about how close the characters should have been in the various fonts, I took my cue from the total width.
- n3k5 7y agoConsider that you're not starting from 'no kerning', but from deliberately bad kerning. The overall width is a given because it tells you the tracking (letter-spacing) you're aiming for. It's common for this parameter to be user-selectable even when kerning is completely automatic (or to be automatically adjusted for the purpose of justification), so when you are the kerning algorithm, it's not your job to question that choice. I can see how this can seem weird, as nominally you are responsible for deciding the overall width. But if you had to try to continue the tracking between the first two glyphs instead, or aim for e.g. "+20%", it would be much more difficult. Being able to continuously deal with the feeling of "they want me to do WHAT!?" is one of the skills that distinguishes pro graphic designers from amateurs ;)
- pfdietz 7y agoShould have been called Kemtype
- maxfan8 7y agoNice pun!
- ozzmotik 7y agothis is a nice keming machine
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoWhen I started using the internet, I would read pom as porn given the horrible font and terminal I was using. It made for some really awkward misunderstandings.
- userbinator 7y agoGoogle ReCAPTCHA, back when it was about OCR'ing books, has apparently made that mistake with pom.xml --- no surprise, I bet 99% of people who saw a CAPTCHA saying "pom" thought it said "porn".
- clarry 7y agoI've had similar isseus with some sans-serif fonts and uppercase letters joining together to form another letter. This might not be the best example but you get the idea... https://i.imgur.com/v2A3m4z.png https://i.imgur.com/v2A3m4z.png
- _bxg1 7y agoDoesn't work in mobile Safari
- kstrauser 7y agoIt works great on iPad.
- cbsks 7y agoI’m on mobile safari as well. I can drag the letters, but I can’t click the “compare” burton.
- soperj 7y agoThat's because Apple doesn't keep their shit up to date.
- mattlondon 7y agoDoesn't work on Android Brave (Chromium 79) browser either. If you try to drag, the whole page scrolls instead.
- bshacklett 7y agoNo luck for me on Chrome on a Pixel3a, either. I can select a character, but I can't move it.
- keyle 7y agoWow after all the bad kerning jokes I can't believe I didn't think of this. So well executed too, very addictive :) Could 'juice'* it a little (*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
- ASTP001 7y agoGreat concept, fun game. Wish it was more mobile friendly.
- alpb 7y agoBazillionth time it’s posted and discussed. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=type.method.ac https://hn.algolia.com/?q=type.method.ac Not sure how HN even allows it.
- dang 7y agoReposts on HN are fine if a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so. This has been the practice for many years here.
- RandallBrown 7y agoIt's actually only the 6th time it's been discussed. Every other time it got 0 comments. The most recent time it got any sort of traction was 4 years ago. Seems reasonable for HN to allow that.
- sandov 7y agoHow had I not seen this before?
- kstrauser 7y agoYour periodic reminder that bad kerning distracted Donald Knuth from TAOCP for a decade or so, setting our industry back countless person-millennia. Do not trifle with kerning. It’s a different kind of Turing tarpit for software engineers.
- lilyball 7y agoI only did 2 words. The first word I almost perfectly nailed it. Only got 80/100. Second word I was further off, got 88/100. I don't understand the scoring.
- fourthark 7y agoI think the scoring depends too much on word length. I consistently did better on longer words.
- aasasd 7y agoNote that the site hosts a few other such games, which are all cool: https://method.ac https://method.ac
- tiborsaas 7y agoIt's a good idea to complete it at least 1 time / year. Wish it had more challenges.
- duopixel 7y agoAuthor here. I’ve been meaning to release a second version of the game, will probably tackle it in 2020 (this game is around eight years old and needs a complete rewrite to work on mobile)
- jraph 7y agoIt works on Firefox Mobile on Android. However, one has to switch from landscape to portrait mode back and forth to kern, and then to click on the next button.
- stared 7y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
- smexy 7y agoThere's always a relevant xkcd...
- MattRix 7y agoNot working at all in Chrome on my Pixel 2