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I run a big CRT monitor with one terminal window and bitmap fonts. I've never had an error using this setup, except when something tries to use a character that

by korse 5y ago

I run a big CRT monitor with one terminal window and bitmap fonts. I've never had an error using this setup, except when something tries to use a character that isn't in my font and I get a �. This is rare. I've also programmed FPGAs to act as serial terminals and had zero problems perfectly displaying bitmap text. If you get something you can't perfectly display, chances are you don't need to display it so you mark it and throw it out (or you have a bitmap version handy). Due to these experiences, stuff like this seems like a major case of 'too much complexity'. Why is this sort of fancy text rendering so important (for a english speaking and writing person that can pretty much do all work and hobby projects in ASCII)?

layer8 5y ago
> (for a english speaking and writing person that can pretty much do all work and hobby projects in ASCII) Most people are not English-speaking/writing and expect “fancy” fonts to not be rendered in a crappy way. Also, the relative blurriness of your CRT alleviates some of the problem. The low-res, mostly latin-only font-rendering world of thirty years ago was certainly simpler.
fatbird 5y ago
"An english speaking person able to work entirely in ASCII" is a single use case that still leads to that complexity: we have emojis because people started drawing things with ascii characters. More recently, we have fonts for coding allowing for ligatures, and they're popular among a significant number of your fellow english speakers who could work entirely in ASCII. Even then, much of the complexity outlined in the article still appears when you consider variable width fonts--really, your use case is english user, using only ASCII in a monospaced font. Variable width fonts need kerning, and to accommodate changes in glyph size based on italic or bold variations. Also, English has ligatures like æ, so if you want to deal with older English texts you need them. And then what do you do if you're working in English but need to discuss other languages, even just common European ones with accents? So your use case is now english ASCII monospace user working who's basically just programming with their editor, and this is a very, very narrow use case considering the rest of English speaking/writing users who want to use computers in their own lives. Now multiply all the complexity I've sketched out for every language on Earth spoken/written by some community that would also like to use computers.
Sharlin 5y ago
You think that it's "too much complexity" just because you happen to be in the small minority of people in the world who can do with extremely limited text rendering?

by korse 5y ago

layer8 5y ago

> (for a english speaking and writing person that can pretty much do all work and hobby projects in ASCII) Most people are not English-speaking/writing and expect “fancy” fonts to not be rendered in a crappy way. Also, the relative blurriness of your CRT alleviates some of the problem. The low-res, mostly latin-only font-rendering world of thirty years ago was certainly simpler.

fatbird 5y ago

"An english speaking person able to work entirely in ASCII" is a single use case that still leads to that complexity: we have emojis because people started drawing things with ascii characters. More recently, we have fonts for coding allowing for ligatures, and they're popular among a significant number of your fellow english speakers who could work entirely in ASCII. Even then, much of the complexity outlined in the article still appears when you consider variable width fonts--really, your use case is english user, using only ASCII in a monospaced font. Variable width fonts need kerning, and to accommodate changes in glyph size based on italic or bold variations. Also, English has ligatures like æ, so if you want to deal with older English texts you need them. And then what do you do if you're working in English but need to discuss other languages, even just common European ones with accents? So your use case is now english ASCII monospace user working who's basically just programming with their editor, and this is a very, very narrow use case considering the rest of English speaking/writing users who want to use computers in their own lives. Now multiply all the complexity I've sketched out for every language on Earth spoken/written by some community that would also like to use computers.

Sharlin 5y ago

You think that it's "too much complexity" just because you happen to be in the small minority of people in the world who can do with extremely limited text rendering?