A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis • Hacker News Board

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#41

Post by Sunspark » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:41 AM UTC

galkk wrote: post #29

Are those statements about “eye strain” for serif, sans and sans serif fonts scientific? Every time I see them they are not supplied by evidence but by some mumbo jumbo.

Yes and no. To a certain extent there is brain familiarity with letter shape, but screen resolution plays a role. Sans fonts are simply more legible on low-resolution displays.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#42

Post by Sunspark » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:57 AM UTC

For a version of the Fell fonts that is variable with cleaner shapes, see Elstob, https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/

You can play with the sliders and it is easy to get the same spacing effect as what the article talks about.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#43

Post by cperciva » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:06 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #35

twic wrote: post #4

When I was trying to avoid writing my thesis I just played video games

I did spend at least 1-2 weeks at the beginning of my thesis solely tweaking the typography. ;)

Doesn't everyone spend a couple weeks figuring out their latex template?

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#44

Post by cperciva » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:09 AM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #36

cperciva wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was trying to avoid working on my thesis I wrote FreeBSD Update and bsdiff.

That’s one incredible flex. If only I could have half your productivity while procrastinating.

To be fair, I wasn't just procrastinating from writing; I was also dealing with being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. I semi-officially took a retroactive leave of absence for a term (I was a bit behind schedule, mentioned the medical issue as having contributed to delays, and the head of the department said "we could say that you had a leave of absence but I don't want to bother with the paperwork if you don't want to").

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#45

Post by leguminous » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:17 AM UTC

sdfsdfdsfsf wrote: post #17

The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…

I assume the author picked up the quotation mark habit from LaTeX. Backticks and apostrophes (single or double) get rendered as proper left and right quotation marks. It's also possible this was copy+pasted from a LaTeX source and they forgot to fix the quotation marks.

The italics on the page are also missing, for me at least. I am seeing them as obliques. The upright roman face is tilted, rather than using the separate set of italic glyphs. Some systems do this if the italic glyphs can't be found or something is misconfigured.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#46

Post by tmoertel » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:51 AM UTC

Sunspark wrote: post #42

For a version of the Fell fonts that is variable with cleaner shapes, see Elstob, https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/ You can play with the sliders and it is easy to get the same spacing effect as what the article talks about.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#47

Post by DiggyJohnson » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:53 AM UTC

This is actually my favorite font execution and post I’ve seen on this site, and believe me, I click on all of them.

(I’m also writing a book, and typeface distraction obviously comes with the territory.)

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#48

Post by gdwatson » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:18 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #34

This font is slightly too messy for me, but I agree that "modern typography" is often too soulless. I'm also hoping for a renaissance of serif fonts - I'm not really buying the narrative that they're not suitable for the web. Not a big typography expert, but one font I like and try to use often, is Baskerville. On the other hand, while I love LaTeX, I absolutely abhor Computer Modern. Maybe it's not the font's fault,…

Computer Modern is okay on paper, but I find it very frustrating to read on screen. I wonder if the Fell types are similar ‐‐ the scan of the thesis, where the letters aren't fit to the pixel grid, looks a lot nicer.

I do like Baskerville, but I am a little sad that the only open source version I know of, Libre Baskerville, changes the design so much for the screen. Caslon is in the same boat.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#49

Post by floren » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:24 AM UTC

Ah, I've found my new terminal font: https://building-m.net/xbackbone/jOGE6/sUGEqePe74/raw.png

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#50

Post by gdwatson » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:38 AM UTC

I'm usually a fan of Windows-style font rendering that snaps on-screen text to the pixel grid. But for this typeface it seems to heavily exaggerate the roughness as the different serifs snap all over. The pictures of the print pages look much nicer.

How does it look on a Mac monitor?