3 ms·
> Because the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter. > Because TODAY the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels p
by M95D 3y ago
> Because the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter.
> Because TODAY the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter.
There. Fixed.
All the bad examples given have antialiasing applied.
In the past there were bitmap fonts that were redered without antialiasing and they were very sharp (as sharp as a CRT could draw them) and then there was manual font hinting with no size interpolation and again with no antialiasing.
Today we can choose between antialiased fonts that are blurry, or no antialiasing that are sharp, but with ugly random stroke widths.
That's because today, who would spend a year to manually do font hinting on thousands of unicode glyphs and dosens of font sizes? And who would deny the user's "right" to footgun their eyes with a 12.5 font size on a bitmap font that only has sizes 11 and 13px?
Want some proof? Open the devtools on his blog and remove the unhinted "IBM Plex Sans". See how much better it looks with the old Arial instead.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe old fonts that have been designed as bitmap fonts or as scalable fonts, but with good manual hinting (which is equivalent with designing bitmap font variants for a set of usual sizes), can indeed be perfectly sharp. Nevertheless, such fonts are always uglier than the good fonts which are rendered on a high-resolution display, where more pixels per character cell are available. Even the 4k displays, when at typical desktop sizes and viewing distances, have a significantly lower resolution than what has been provided by the traditional printing of books on paper and than what is needed to exceed the resolution of normal human vision. I do not consider any display that is uglier than a printed book from a few centuries ago as an acceptable display.
- M95D 3y agoI accept your choice. Buy whatever monitor you like. It would be good if programmers like that guy would accept MY choice and not force antialiasing on my eyes, and then blame the monitor instead of the font and the rendering engine.