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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

korigamik.dev

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#31
post #20
post #3

Ai writing

Someone here a couple of months ago made a tool[0] to detect AI writing on websites. This one gets categorized as "pure slop" https://tropes.fyi/vetter/d7cebcde [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513

Too bad that tool sucks. I ran my own blog through it and it gave me a middling score, even though I’ve never touched it with an AI tool of any kind, even Grammarly.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#33
post #20
post #3

Ai writing

Someone here a couple of months ago made a tool[0] to detect AI writing on websites. This one gets categorized as "pure slop" https://tropes.fyi/vetter/d7cebcde [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513

I rather see the prompt they used to make that article, than the article itself. It overstayed it's welcome to say nothing.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't disagree more, I get headaches from blurry text, so I daily drive Terminus TTF, and have done so for years. Modern font rendering really has becole quite terrible unless you own a high DPI screen, even when using full hinting. And no, subpixel anti-aliasing doesn't help, the colour bleeding is even worse.

Buy a modern monitor or just run your display at a low res and disable antialiasing? Phones are now 500 PPI+, theres no real excuse for using a low DPI screen.

Income and effective cost of things like desktop monitors vary wildly across the world, that argument doesn't really fly.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#35

I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font they mention also seem interesting. In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything…

Well-hinted fonts such as Consolas are indeed very rare.

I think I've only found Liberation and Hack to appear decent on standard density display. Roboto Mono is nicely shaped but blurry. I think Noto Mono used to have hints but dropped them. It was hours spent trying out different fonts only to ultimately go back to msttcore-fonts for me.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#38
A few years ago, when I wrote my own Invaders-like game [1], I was quite unhappy with the rendering quality of the HTML Canvas fillText() method. The antialiasing introduced multiple shades of green, whereas I wanted to render the text in a solid monochrome green while the glyphs retained their crisp, jagged edges. Although `canvas { image-rendering: pixelated }` improved the crispness and jaggedness, it could not entirely eliminate the multiple shades of green.

I finally decided to take the matter into my own hands. I looked for IBM PC OEM fonts [2] and similar ones [3], stored the bitmaps as integer arrays within my code [2], and used them to render each character cell by cell. I am very happy with the results.

It was a childhood dream of mine to write a game like this, but I did not have sufficient access to computers as a child. So I could fulfil this dream only as an adult, a few years ago. The implementation is very simple, and everything on the canvas, including the text, is drawn using fillRect().

By the way, if you happen to do something similar, I have made all the bitmaps available as integer arrays in a separate, standalone project [5].

[1] https://susam.net/invaders.html

[2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

[3] https://www.dafont.com/modern-dos.font

[4] https://codeberg.org/susam/invaders/src/branch/main/invaders...

[5] https://codeberg.org/susam/pcface#readme

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#39
post #20
post #3

Ai writing

Someone here a couple of months ago made a tool[0] to detect AI writing on websites. This one gets categorized as "pure slop" https://tropes.fyi/vetter/d7cebcde [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513

From that website: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence. Extremely common in Claude and ChatGPT markdown output. Almost nobody formats lists this way when writing by hand. It's a telltale sign of AI-generated documentation and blog posts AND README files (especially with emojis)."

That’s bullshit. It’s very common.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#40

I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font they mention also seem interesting. In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything…

100% the same problem here.

I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.

These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?

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