[poleguy]

O, no... the o's render square and then round and then square again on xubuntu/chrome... what's up!?!...

https://imgur.com/a/0LcqKej

Many things seem to change because people need to change things to rationalize their job title. Is that what's going on here?

[hermitdev]

The o's look bad, but wtf is up with the e's in that picture?

[poleguy]

Funny, all the e's look about the same to me. Do you just not like the style? That's not my complaint about the o's. I'm complaining that some are square and some are round. Specifically the o In "Notice" looks roundish and the O in "Today" is squared off.

[panda888888]

This screenshot looks perfectly normal on my computer, or maybe I just can't see the difference. All of the o's look the same to me. Anybody else...?

[poleguy]

Look very closely at the o in "Notice" and the o in "Today"... I see that if I zoom in to the image it looks better than when I zoom out, so there is clearly some interaction going on with the video driver on my screen at 100% zoom that makes it more obvious for me. But the two o's are not the same, the o in Today is narrower, and ends up looking squared off on my screen, and the o in "Notice" looks rounder and more open.

Now I realize that for you to see it, a good zoomed photo with my phone will go a long way:

Here's where twitter's font goes oh-so wrong: https://imgur.com/a/Wpw97He

[iainmerrick]

I think this is just horizontal antialiasing kicking in.

The o in “Notice” happens to start slightly to the left of a pixel boundary, so it has a narrow strip of very light pixels on its left side (pixels with maybe 10-20% coverage). That makes the boundary look fuzzier and rounder.

The o in “Today” is probably more or less flush with the pixel boundary, so its left side has dark-coloured pixels (80-90% coverage).

It’s likely also the case that it isn’t scaling the luminance to account for sRGB properly. If a pixel is say 20% covered by black-on-white text, you multiply 255 by 20% to give a linear brightness of 51; but for onscreen display this should be converted to sRGB, which is around 124 (gamma ~2.2). If you don’t correct the gamma, the left edge of that o is much darker than it should be, so it looks square rather than rounded off.

Opinions differ as to whether text should be gamma-corrected! If you don’t correct the gamma, it looks darker and sharper, which many people prefer. But it’s actually sharper because it’s more aliased, which exacerbates the kind of moire glitches you’re seeing.

I personally prefer text with no hinting and correct gamma, as I think macOS and iOS do it, but it does look much fuzzier on low-res screens that way so some people dislike it.