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Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

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Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#111

Post by zwaps »

toyg wrote: post #102
zwaps wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are blurry fonts on 1080p screens, which are the default to this day and essentially required if you seek high refresh rates on a budget.

Everyone without a retina screen is wrong, according to you. And yet, fonts used to look just fine on our terrible screens.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#112

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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.

You can get strong hinting by changing hintstyle to hintstrong in fontconfig. It doesn't match Windows completely, but for some fonts it's close.

Infinality-fontconfig used to be the thing for emulating the font rendering of other operating systems, I haven't kept up since freetype merged the various interpreter tweaks that used to be proprietary. I'm sure you can pass options to fontconfig/freetype to tweak it to your liking.

I stick to hintslight now and I'm perfectly happy with the results.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#113

Post by aasasd »

andai wrote: post #19
heelix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could format my table layout with the font to make it pixel perfect, assuming a white on white color scheme. /s

The other day I discovered https://favicon.cc , "in beta" since 2007. Instead of canvas it uses a html table for drawing (as well as the 1:1 preview!)

I mean, I slapped together a table-based image renderer back around '04—the result was bloated but iirc could be displayed in Links.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#114

Post by DavidSJ »

Recently I came across https://512pixels.net/2014/04/aqua-past-future/ and was overcome with nostalgia for System 7.

Maybe it’s just that a Mac IIsi running System 7 was my first computer when I was seven years old, but I think there’s a timeless beauty to the operating system that no later release has really captured.

Some more images here: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os

Those folder and control panel icons just slay me.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#115

Post by aasasd »

nullc wrote: post #44
Stratoscope wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ten times the resources for doing the same thing Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing? My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays. My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an edit…

> My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line. I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s. Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency a…

I happen to have an experience with Pentium at 75 MHz, where text in Borland Pascal on DOS appeared slower than I could type (long before learning touch-typing), and pressing backspace after spotting an error required some patience.

Scrolling in GUIs is known to be sorta expensive: it's normally offloaded to the graphics system to be done wholesale as just a shift of the image, but if your GPU drivers suck then you're in for a crappy time (which was normally a thing in a fresh installation of Windows or Linux).

Basically, don't do much on a weak CPU.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#116

Post by jtvjan »

arrayjumper wrote: post #105
romwell wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

What's the point of forcing HTTPS? It's a pizza place, not a bank.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#117

Post by everdrive »

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 better than 50% of websites out there today. I can find all the buttons, the functions of things are clear, and I know how to contact the owner. The menu is text instead of PDF, and the whole thing appears to run properly without javascript enabled.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#118

Post by mhd »

I switched to Safari as I've got my default browser set up to ignore all fonts (right now using Computer Modern for everything), but the display gets a bit weird -- while fonts are rendered the way they're meant to, it seems the line breaks in the code cause some whitespace in the text.

https://i.imgur.com/v80wKdf.jpg

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#119

Post by aasasd »

DavidSJ wrote: post #114

Recently I came across https://512pixels.net/2014/04/aqua-past-future/ and was overcome with nostalgia for System 7. Maybe it’s just that a Mac IIsi running System 7 was my first computer when I was seven years old, but I think there’s a timeless beauty to the operating system that no later release has really captured. Some more images here: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os Those folder and con…

You can run it in emulators. I was doing that on Android recently, to play Deja Vu.

However, you probably cherish more your memory of the system than the actual thing, and emulators don't help with that.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#120

Post by dredmorbius »

m0xte wrote: post #84
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.

https://www.lingscars.com/ Also comes to mind as too perfect on the font rendering side of things

Dear sweet FSM, Ling's Cars!

https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/P3wjS7HVW0Zq-7qdRMyVeA

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350

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