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Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

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Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#101

Post by tomxor »

jfk13 wrote: post #78
kccqzy wrote: post #29

Ligatures are missing :( Look at the IE5 screenshot. The second last line has the word "finibus" and notice how the "f" and the "i" seem to be combined together. That's a ligature. In contrast in the body text of the website I don't see any. The word "file" in the paragraph right above the screenshot is missing that ligature. Kerning is, well, also wrong. So wrong that I literally trouble reading the body text, but I…

Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together... just like they do for the "in" and "ni" pairs following. (It was possible to render a real fi glyph, but only by using the Unicode presentation-form code point U+FB01;…

> Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together.

That's actually a really neat solution in the absence of explicitly defined ligatures... since there is no antialiasing, it only needs a little care when designing the font at the pixel level and choice of kerning and the result will be indistinguishable. fi is a very geometrically natural ligature though, i wonder if it doesn't work so well for others that are too dissimilar to their components.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#102

Post by toyg »

zwaps wrote: post #92
jerome-jh wrote: post #70

I hate antialiasing. I absolutely cannot stand blurry fonts. First thing I do on a Linux box is install the ambiguously licensed "mscorefonts" and disable antialiasing everywhere possible. That is explained in the font-howto that may be a bit outdated now. Verdana for the interface, Times New Roman, Courier New for monospace ... aaaaahhhhh!

I also never understood why people like blurry fonts so much. To me, win2k fonts were much better than the ones we have today. I guess it‘s because Apple did it.

There are no blurry fonts if you use the right screens for 2020 - i.e. HiDPI / "retina" etc.

If your pixels are visible then yeah, nothing beats fonts designed for big pixels.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#103

Post by jansan »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #96

scaling up a font just so autotrace won't create curves out of the pixels? sounds like a hack compared to finding a program which converts pixels into squares.

Autotrace is the wrong apporoach here imo. Yes, fonts usually consist of quadratic curves, but they perfectly well support straight lines (and as a result the files will become pretty small, too). There is no reason why the original pixels cannot be converted with full precision using horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe the tool that can do this was not available.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#104

Post by a_lieb »

jsolson wrote: post #50

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!)

Nice easter egg from the source code:

   -->

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#105

Post by arrayjumper »

romwell wrote: post #90
phinnaeus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god, they even have a working link to a zip file containing a Netscape Navigator exe. I hope that's on a CDN.

It's not, the download failed several times for me. When it finally worked, I was disappointed to see that I couldn't get it to run on Win 10 (64-bit). (It does appear to be a Windows executable, though)

I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google.

Sadly https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ and http://www.dinostomatopie.com/ failed to open with a message saying "Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithm(s)".

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#106

Post by vvillena »

edeion wrote: post #100
jerome-jh wrote: post #70

I hate antialiasing. I absolutely cannot stand blurry fonts. First thing I do on a Linux box is install the ambiguously licensed "mscorefonts" and disable antialiasing everywhere possible. That is explained in the font-howto that may be a bit outdated now. Verdana for the interface, Times New Roman, Courier New for monospace ... aaaaahhhhh!

The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you joking? But I wonder to myself: what does he call blurry fonts. Anti-aliased fonts, of course. But I've never seen them as blurry and I guess most other people don't, otherwise we'd not like them better. Don't you think there could be a sight specificity? Do you have extremely sharp eyesight?

Windows does antialias in a special way. MacOS and Linux are usually configured to respect the font shapes, using subpixels as needed. Windows font rendering prefers to snap to the nearest pixel, increasing sharpness but not being as faithful to the letter shapes.

Some people don't care, some people get used to both, but for some people going from Windows to anything else is difficult.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#107

Post by garaetjjte »

edeion wrote: post #100
jerome-jh wrote: post #70

I hate antialiasing. I absolutely cannot stand blurry fonts. First thing I do on a Linux box is install the ambiguously licensed "mscorefonts" and disable antialiasing everywhere possible. That is explained in the font-howto that may be a bit outdated now. Verdana for the interface, Times New Roman, Courier New for monospace ... aaaaahhhhh!

The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you joking? But I wonder to myself: what does he call blurry fonts. Anti-aliased fonts, of course. But I've never seen them as blurry and I guess most other people don't, otherwise we'd not like them better. Don't you think there could be a sight specificity? Do you have extremely sharp eyesight?

It's taking time to get used to. Windows did and still does very strongly hinted fonts. When I first started using Linux blurriness annoyed me greatly, but after few years I don't care anymore.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#108

Post by dtgay »

jsolson wrote: post #50

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

The “Cocktails” section goes straight from one Springsteen reference to another (“Racing in the Street” and “The River”). I love it.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#109

Post by aasasd »

garaetjjte wrote: post #107
edeion wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you joking? But I wonder to myself: what does he call blurry fonts. Anti-aliased fonts, of course. But I've never seen them as blurry and I guess most other people don't, otherwise we'd not like them better. Don't you think there could be a sight specificity? Do you have extremely sharp eyesight?

It's taking time to get used to. Windows did and still does very strongly hinted fonts. When I first started using Linux blurriness annoyed me greatly, but after few years I don't care anymore.

I fell in love with MacOS when I discovered I can scale text or web pages to arbitrary values—without letters losing their shapes unless I stick to certain numbers.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#110

Post by madjam002 »

jsolson wrote: post #50

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

My favourite part of that website is the position:fixed ceiling fan GIF

https://www.dinostomatopie.com/dinostomatomenu.html

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