Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zokier 487 days ago
One of those things that to me is frustrating is how there is no clear unambiguous definition of what is correct in font rendering. Presumably typeface designers have some specific intent on how heavy strokes and stems are, but then that somehow becomes ambiguous when a font gets rendered on screen.

Asking for user feedback feels kinda pointless in that context, does your average user know what some random font should look like? Better would be to ask type designers for feedback on rendering their own typefaces
2 comments
crazygringo 487 days ago
There is actually a definition of what is correct, and I'm pretty sure Adobe Photoshop does it in one of its modes.

It's just pure grayscale antialiasing of the underlying letterform, with the correct gamma used by the monitor. Or subpixel rendering if you want, as long as it matches your screen's actual LCD layout.

The issue is that that's not necessarily what's most readable. So various forms of hinting and darkening can be introduced to improve readability, and all of that is of course entirely subjective.

link
eviks 486 days ago
Since readability is the most important factor in the area of text design, your definition of correct that goes against that is incorrect
link
groby_b 486 days ago
Vastly oversimplified, that'd be because fonts are individual strokes of varying width and free layout that get rendered on a array of pixels with fixed sizes and fixed layout.

Resampling comes with some aliasing/information loss. Font rendering is about picking which losses you're willing to take.

And you can't just "ask designers" because the trade-offs are different based on resolution and pixel layout. And they change as you scale the font up and down. ("Font hinting" tries to fix issues with that scaling. It's got its own downsides)

And because it's fun, there's also a perception component, where different people can just look at the same font and process it differently.

Font rendering is the art of making compromises that offend the least amount of people. A good starting point on the subject: "Text rendering hates you" - https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

(I could swear there was also a great post by Raph Levien, but I can't find it)

link