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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

#251

Post by OzzyB »

mikedc wrote: post #184
OzzyB wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, welcome to Corporate Typograhism™ where big corp takes an already existing (copyrighted) font -- change it a little -- then release it as their own. Some Copyright is more Copyright than others...

The implication that this is a practice being used to skirt copyright is wrong. In almost all cases the font foundry is commissioned by a company to produce a distinct (or not so distinct as the case may be) variant of a typeface/family, licensed to them for their use - as an alternative to having the foundry create an entirely new typeface from scratch.

The point I'm making is that you can simply modify an already existing font "just enough" for it to be considered a new work.

This is essentially what happened with Arial w/ Helvetica; and companies have been doing this ever since to create new licenses that they can control.

We are drowning in Grotesk/Sans-Serif/Helvetica type fonts! Do we really need another "Big Tech Sans"? Or rather, why can't Twitter just use X? xD

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

#252

Post by poleguy »

poleguy wrote: post #250
iainmerrick wrote: post #148

This looks very much as if the font renderer is aggressively hinting to the pixel grid vertically, but not horizontally. That’s a known trick for getting a decent compromise between crisp text (along the baselines and tops of letters) with subpixel horizontal kerning. I doubt the Android renderer is really broken and no-one has noticed until now, so I’d guess the font either has bad hinting, or more likely it’s just…

It may indeed be a problem with hinting. Certainly two o's render very differently on my screen. I first tried to show what I saw by doing a screen grab, but then realized that the image apparently looks different on my screen vs others. Now I realize that for others to see it, a good zoomed photo with my phone will go a long way: https://imgur.com/a/Wpw97He Step back ten feet and you'll notice that the o In "Notice"…

I just realized that this must not be the chirp font at all, based on looking at the g. This must be some fall-back font. oops. Still it looks terrible.

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

#253

Post by aaomidi »

chociej wrote: post #96
aaomidi wrote: post #66

The new font is also destroying Arabic and Farsi text. Does Twitter not have a single Farsi or Arabic speaking employee? This is an indication that they really don't value diverse employees there. Can't believe no one was like "hey this is destroying readability of these two major languages."

The new font doesn't even have Arabic characters in my browser. It just gets rendered in Segoe UI. Which is fine, for what it's worth.

https://twitter.com/aaomidi/status/1425827687428415489

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

#254

Post by iainmerrick »

poleguy wrote: post #249
panda888888 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This screenshot looks perfectly normal on my computer, or maybe I just can't see the difference. All of the o's look the same to me. Anybody else...?

Look very closely at the o in "Notice" and the o in "Today"... I see that if I zoom in to the image it looks better than when I zoom out, so there is clearly some interaction going on with the video driver on my screen at 100% zoom that makes it more obvious for me. But the two o's are not the same, the o in Today is narrower, and ends up looking squared off on my screen, and the o in "Notice" looks rounder and more…

I think this is just horizontal antialiasing kicking in.

The o in “Notice” happens to start slightly to the left of a pixel boundary, so it has a narrow strip of very light pixels on its left side (pixels with maybe 10-20% coverage). That makes the boundary look fuzzier and rounder.

The o in “Today” is probably more or less flush with the pixel boundary, so its left side has dark-coloured pixels (80-90% coverage).

It’s likely also the case that it isn’t scaling the luminance to account for sRGB properly. If a pixel is say 20% covered by black-on-white text, you multiply 255 by 20% to give a linear brightness of 51; but for onscreen display this should be converted to sRGB, which is around 124 (gamma ~2.2). If you don’t correct the gamma, the left edge of that o is much darker than it should be, so it looks square rather than rounded off.

Opinions differ as to whether text should be gamma-corrected! If you don’t correct the gamma, it looks darker and sharper, which many people prefer. But it’s actually sharper because it’s more aliased, which exacerbates the kind of moire glitches you’re seeing.

I personally prefer text with no hinting and correct gamma, as I think macOS and iOS do it, but it does look much fuzzier on low-res screens that way so some people dislike it.

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

#255

Post by Arnavion »

Markoff wrote: post #239
Arnavion wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that do for fontawesome-style fonts (icons in the private area) that websites love to use instead of SVGs and text labels? I personally block fonts via uBlock Origin, which lets me allow them for the subset of websites I visit regularly enough that I'm okay with allowing fontawesome-style fonts.

blocking remote fonts in uBlock Origin has zero effect on Twitter, just tried, unless you mean something else, in that case please enlighten me how to have back left column with same font as before

https://i.postimg.cc/5Nk9tczJ/sw-appy-20210813-193919.png

https://i.postimg.cc/Gm8L8MPy/sw-appy-20210813-193924.png

In case that website blocks hotlinking: https://postimg.cc/gallery/RVSBXh7

The first image shows https://twitter.com/newsycombinator with devtools on the right showing that the computed `font-family` for that one span has "TwitterChirp", and the uBO logger at the bottom showing that chirp-*.woff fonts were blocked by my uBO rules.

The second image is the Fonts tab of the dev tools showing that the font that the browser is using is Roboto, which I have available locally.

As for how I do it, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284124 . If you don't want to go that far, you can still create a rule just for twitter.com that blocks just the chirp*.woff URLs.

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

#256

Post by LocalH »

raxxorrax wrote: post #244
OzzyB wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, welcome to Corporate Typograhism™ where big corp takes an already existing (copyrighted) font -- change it a little -- then release it as their own. Some Copyright is more Copyright than others...

At least there is no copyright on the alphabet.

Yet.

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

#257

Post by LocalH »

jchw wrote: post #187
spoonjim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you know this, but for others: This is a cost-saving move. It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtu…

> a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own. IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily the US and Japan. Also, I don’t think it’s quite that simple either. The actual type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the compute…

By “copy a font” they likely mean recreating it. If one is working from a printed specimen in the US, such activity is legal.

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

#258

Post by thristian »

jayesh-bhoot wrote: post #221
thristian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's "Don't allow websites to use custom fonts" option makes the Web feel much more cohesive and polished.

I will plug my Firefox addon here which builds on this Firefox’s feature. Basically the add-on remembers the websites for which the user wants to enforce/unenforce browser fonts. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enforce-brows...

I used to have an addon like that, that died in the WebExtensions apocalypse. It's great to have a replacement!

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

#259

Post by thristian »

Arnavion wrote: post #218
thristian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's "Don't allow websites to use custom fonts" option makes the Web feel much more cohesive and polished.

What does that do for fontawesome-style fonts (icons in the private area) that websites love to use instead of SVGs and text labels? I personally block fonts via uBlock Origin, which lets me allow them for the subset of websites I visit regularly enough that I'm okay with allowing fontawesome-style fonts.

Firefox is smart enough to not block fonts that are used to render PUA characters.

It doesn't help with icon fonts based on ligatures instead of PUA characters (Google's Material Design framework seems to do this) but we can't have everything.

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