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Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

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Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#161

Post by bscphil »

Narretz wrote: post #115
crazygringo wrote: post #70

A tweet showing the actual difference as screenshot: https://twitter.com/Tempo_Storm/status/1425549066377777156 Appears to be a standard-res Windows rendering. (Obviously a Retina Mac/iOS rendering will be totally different.)

I don't know if it's the quality of the screenshot, but the left image (old) looks way more blurry to me then the new one.

The screenshots are horrible quality, it's effectively a meaningless comparison. (And even if they weren't, comparing two fonts using Windows' font rendering is an exercise in pointlessness since the heavy hinting destroys small differences anyway.)

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#162

Post by helipad »

Since most of the comments are negative, I will say I noticed the new font yesterday and loved it on my Windows computer in Chrome.

I switch between Mac for work and Windows for pleasure and Windows font rendering can be hit and miss.

I notice fonts on websites a lot and get frustrated when they're bad but this was one of the most pleasant ones I've experienced, to the point I went and looked it up. I didn't realize it was a modified Grilli Type, I've always enjoyed their fonts so not much surprise I liked it.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#164

Post by tehbeard »

helipad wrote: post #162

Since most of the comments are negative, I will say I noticed the new font yesterday and loved it on my Windows computer in Chrome. I switch between Mac for work and Windows for pleasure and Windows font rendering can be hit and miss. I notice fonts on websites a lot and get frustrated when they're bad but this was one of the most pleasant ones I've experienced, to the point I went and looked it up. I didn't realize…

Can I ask for your resolution + monitor size?

I'm on Windows, and in Chrome and Firefox this new font is a pain to read.

( 1080p / 24" here )

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#165

Post by tehbeard »

bpodgursky wrote: post #155
mihaic wrote: post #33

To anyone saying "Users will complain about anything", I'm on a Windows desktop and this is honestly the most unpleasant reading experience I've had on any big website in recent memory. There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused, further straining my eyes. Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.

HN is reliably the worst reading experience I have on the internet, exclusively because of the lack of line-wrapping.

No, no no no, atleast the font is crisp and the contrast is good on HN.

The line wrapping I can quasi-forgive as this being a place for discussion rather than dumping 

 code blocks.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#166

Post by pdkl95 »

sli wrote: post #64
ceejayoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame the browsers, really. Look at the source code of Twitter or Facebook. It's intentionally obfuscated and mangled, probably in part to fuck with ad blockers. I have a few user stylesheets (even a little custom Firefox extension to block one user's comments on a site I frequent), but the sites I'd really like to use them on largely don't make it possible to do so. Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's we…

* { font-family: 'Verdana, sans-serif !important' }

It took a while to setup, but fixing the problem in the font rendering layer has worked really well. Several years ago - after being annoyed by blurry/bad fonts, extremely bad hinting, and other font problems - I spent a few weeks investigating the way fonts are rendered and a few more weeks comparing many different fonts and various permutations of rendering/hinting methods. The result of all that work included a set of fontconfig files with long lists like this;

    
      
        Arial
        Ubuntu
      
      
        Helvetica
        Ubuntu
      
      
      
      
        sans-serif
        Ubuntu
This way, my font overrides happen in any software that uses fontconfig (i.e. most X11 software that uses TrueType fonts).

    $ fc-match Helvetica
    Ubuntu-R.ttf: "Ubuntu" "Regular"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28typeface%29

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#167

Post by turtlebits »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #133
turtlebits wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's chirp webfont is almost 100k. On optimized sites, that can easily be larger then all of the HTML/CSS combined.

But tens to even hundreds of times smaller than any single tweet that has an image in it, so not really a useful metric.

That attitude is why web pages have gotten so bloated.

https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts, 500k+ of JS)

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#168

Post by hermitdev »

poleguy wrote: post #123
mihaic wrote: post #33

To anyone saying "Users will complain about anything", I'm on a Windows desktop and this is honestly the most unpleasant reading experience I've had on any big website in recent memory. There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused, further straining my eyes. Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.

O, no... the o's render square and then round and then square again on xubuntu/chrome... what's up!?!... https://imgur.com/a/0LcqKej Many things seem to change because people need to change things to rationalize their job title. Is that what's going on here?

The o's look bad, but wtf is up with the e's in that picture?

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#170

Post by chipotle_coyote »

warent wrote: post #126
kps wrote: post #34

The ‘custom’ font has been identified¹ as Grilli Type GT America ² with minor spacing change and a Twitter logo in the PUA. ¹ https://twitter.com/jeffjose/status/1425626162219286529 ² https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-america

Interestingly that means Twitter text is no longer fully portable. If you copy some text from Twitter, you specifically need Chirp to render it properly or else characters like their special logo character will be broken for all other fonts  Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly... Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm feeling like this is an intentional decision in order to push other fonts/found…

This seems a little paranoid, yes. :) What text do you envision copying from Twitter that's going to specifically include their special logo character? It's not going to be in anybody's tweet text.

> Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...

Uh, isn't putting your own characters in Unicode's private use area specifically what that area is for? Isn't that where fonts that have dingbats unique to them, for instance, would put them?

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