Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

vistaserv.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 177 posts

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#61

Post by adrianN »

asveikau wrote: post #47
nullc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I regularly experience typing lag in Slack on a modern Macbook Pro.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#64

Post by himlion »

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…

Agreed, the terrible kerning on this page hurts my eyes.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#65

Post by _Microft »

nicetryguy wrote: post #45

this Web Site has been visited 1,337 times

It is not the earliest time of the web but marquee text, loud colours, visible separators ("hr"), grey color gradients to give a 3d-look, elaborate page visit counters, "cgi" in urls, guest books and "under construction" gifs are what I remember of the web of times long past indeed.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#66

Post by viler »

Impressive research work (and results)!

I actually went through the same experimentation when I worked on the fonts and the website at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/. I ended up with a slightly different solution - the Bits'N'Picas converter, which works very much like potrace-pixelperfect, and takes either .png or actual bitmap fonts as input: https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas.

What would be ideal is if the bitmap strikes themselves could be rendered in the browser - not really a tall order since they're part of the TrueType specs, and a rasterizer is supposed to use them when they exist. Unfortunately, it turned out that most browsers run the OpenType Sanitizer on the webfonts they parse, and it removes certain tables including the ones that specify the bitmaps. :(

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#67

Post by qubex »

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.

That’s a real “blast from the past” vibe. I’m absolutely impressed!

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#68

Post by xenonite »

toothbrush wrote: post #49
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...

Firefox on macOS also gives me a blurry result on a retina display. However it seems to work great on macOS in Safari and Opera (Chromium).

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#69

Post by phinnaeus »

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

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#70

Post by jerome-jh »

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!

Post reply on HN