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

71–80 of 177 posts

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#71

Post by beeforpork »

toothbrush wrote: post #43
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…

Well, you don't need to do much for this, because there are only two ligatures that were commonly supported: 'fi' and 'fl'.

For the kerning, ok, that's more work...

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#72

Post by nodoodles »

toothbrush wrote: post #15

Hello! Co-founder here – wow, front page, that's flattering! We have indeed still got a bunch of visual glitches we couldn't iron out, including the one ~saagarjha has reported to WebKit! We had assumed it was our font being broken, but i'm keen to follow that one. Otherwise getting hinting right on all browsers in high-DPI has basically been impossible. Maybe we should simply recommend everyone use a Windows 98 User…

Great idea! One could embed windows 95 a la https://win95.ajf.me/ just to run IE within the page with all the right rendering. Or a subset of custom font rendering to a canvas :)

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#73

Post by toothbrush »

nodoodles wrote: post #72
toothbrush wrote: post #15

Hello! Co-founder here – wow, front page, that's flattering! We have indeed still got a bunch of visual glitches we couldn't iron out, including the one ~saagarjha has reported to WebKit! We had assumed it was our font being broken, but i'm keen to follow that one. Otherwise getting hinting right on all browsers in high-DPI has basically been impossible. Maybe we should simply recommend everyone use a Windows 98 User…

Great idea! One could embed windows 95 a la https://win95.ajf.me/ just to run IE within the page with all the right rendering. Or a subset of custom font rendering to a canvas :)

We were actually just talking about compiling something like FreeType to JavaScript, but then you'd find yourself re-implementing a browser with layout engine etc...

However, your other idea is great! You might enjoy https://paschke-images-test.s3.amazonaws.com/welcome.html ;)

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#74

Post by edejong »

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 needs to be part of our webring! I contacted the webmaster.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#75

Post by titzer »

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.

Emacs is largely written in e-lisp. Does it have problems with lag? I don't think so.

I think what made (makes) those editors laggy is a heavyweight representation of text and a creating a lot of garbage when processing said text.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#77

Post by jbverschoor »

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!

Get a hidpi screen.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#78

Post by jfk13 »

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; IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures in Latin script, and even if it did, Times New Roman did not have the OpenType support for that.)

It does appear that the IE5 screenshot shows significantly tighter letter spacing in general than the body text, which is why we see the "fi" glyphs touching in IE5 whereas they're separate in the text of the page. I guess that's probably related to size-specific glyph metrics or hinting that is snapping the glyph advances to a narrower width than the "fake-bitmap" font produces.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#79

Post by mappu »

Thorrez wrote: post #62

In both Chrome and Firefox On Windows 10 at 100% zoom in the browser and 100% screen scaling this looks blurry; the pixels in the font don't line up with the pixels of my monitor unfortunately.

Here's my screenshot, 100% zoom, Debian/kwin_wayland; https://i.imgur.com/tu1V1pp.png

Firefox 68esr (left) is crisp but has too tall characters(?) resulting in a gap in lowercase 'o'.

Chrome 80 (right) has this problem and is blurry in addition.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#80

Post by toothbrush »

mappu wrote: post #79
Thorrez wrote: post #62

In both Chrome and Firefox On Windows 10 at 100% zoom in the browser and 100% screen scaling this looks blurry; the pixels in the font don't line up with the pixels of my monitor unfortunately.

Here's my screenshot, 100% zoom, Debian/kwin_wayland; https://i.imgur.com/tu1V1pp.png Firefox 68esr (left) is crisp but has too tall characters(?) resulting in a gap in lowercase 'o'. Chrome 80 (right) has this problem and is blurry in addition.

Wow, that's not great – thanks for the report!
Post reply on HN