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Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

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Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#41

Post by andreareina »

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…

For concrete examples, take a look at any word where a 'd' is followed by a letter with a vertical stroke on the left side (e.g. "did", "middle", etc).

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#42

Post by Stratoscope »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #12
peterburkimsher wrote: post #2

Anti-aliasing isn't enough, because of hinting. So they had to use FontForge to recreate old-looking fonts! I really like the retro scrollbar as well.

The scrollbars are done properly using CSS pseudo selectors too. I was half expecting to find some javascript sludge but there's none to be found.

And they are almost spot on, very nice work.

The only issue I noticed is that the up/down buttons don't have a "pressed" state as they should. The arrow should move down and to the right by one pixel (with some appropriate redrawing of the border - I would have to look up the details on that). But even with that one nit, very nicely done!

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#43

Post by toothbrush »

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…

Yep, we deliberately didn't convert the full set of glyphs from each of the fonts we support, mostly just because it was quite laborious (not to mention CPU time-consuming) to generate our relatively small range of weights, sizes, and font families as-is, so missing ligatures are a known issue.

If it's really illegible, i wonder if there isn't some other rendering bug happening – we admittedly didn't do much testing other than Chrome/Safari/Firefox on latest macOS. And i've seen some pretty weird glitches with this kind of custom font, e.g., https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/13. If something is truly that broken feel free to hit us up at webmaster@ with a screenshot, we'd appreciate the bug reports!

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#44

Post by nullc »

Stratoscope wrote: post #40
plerpin wrote: post #8

LOL! Funny how doing something in 2020 takes ten times the resources for doing the same thing in 1995. Every pixel on these fonts is now a complex vector path.

> 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 and interactive responsiveness for simple tasks like text editing is not generally one of them.

Whenever I go into the attic to dig out a really old machine to pull something off it, I am immediately struck by how much more responsive the interface is compared to current systems.

I respect that your experience is different but I can't figure out how that could possibly be.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#46

Post by kdrag0n »

Most (but not all) of the text is slightly blurry for me on Linux with a HiDPI display at 200% scale, using grayscale antialiasing: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7930239/81491203-4...

I'm using Chromium, but the "-webkit-font-smoothing: none" style doesn't appear to be changing anything.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#47

Post by asveikau »

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 remember text editing UIs struggling when the machine was otherwise overloaded.

Although that started happening much more when text editors started to be written in garbage collected languages more often, which I put in the current century.

I still get that today if I use an old machine and/or a fancy text editor.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#48

Post by msla »

The next step is emulating a CRT monitor to get the fundamentally analog nature of the display right: Even if the computer thinks in pixels, it was still ultimately controlling a complex analog waveform being sent to some number of electron guns steered by magnets. Higher-resolution later computer monitors came closer to imitating pixels, but analog TV didn't try; it just had lines and interlaced fields. Old games took advantage of the analog nature of TVs to smooth over their graphics:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#49

Post by toothbrush »

kdrag0n wrote: post #46

Most (but not all) of the text is slightly blurry for me on Linux with a HiDPI display at 200% scale, using grayscale antialiasing: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7930239/81491203-4... I'm using Chromium, but the "-webkit-font-smoothing: none" style doesn't appear to be changing anything.

Thanks for the report! I wonder if that only works on macOS...

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#50

Post by jsolson »

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.
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