Interesting Font



  • A friend sent this to me (yeah.. it's .jpg, I know):

    If you try hard enough, you can actually read it (and of course you can also just copy&paste it). I'm not so sure this is the font Apple wanted to use though.. (Which one is it actually? Even if it wasn't bold it would look pretty weird.)

     

    Obviously this might not be the fault of Apple, but of the user.. can't tell.


     



  • Further evidence that software companies don't want you to actually READ the EULA.



  • When my old ME box started running out of system resources, the first warning was that all of the text turned into a certain random font - Seanchlo, I believe. At that point, if you didn't close some windows right there, the next thing to go would be the Firefox spinner, followed by the close and min/max buttons. Then the title bar colour.



  • wtf

    Happens every time in wine.



  • The Marlett reminds me of this, from around 2002:



  • @aythun said:

    wtf

    Happens every time in wine.

    I tell you, with those license terms it's a legal minefield.


  • It looks like that dumb Hawaii Thing Sumfin Sumfin font.

    If you turn on Cleartype, it might improve things.



  • @Brother Laz said:

    When my old ME box started running out of system resources, the first warning was that all of the text turned into a certain random font - Seanchlo, I believe. At that point, if you didn't close some windows right there, the next thing to go would be the Firefox spinner, followed by the close and min/max buttons. Then the title bar colour.

    I had a similar problem in WinME and some beta graphics card drivers - VooDoo 3 3000 at the time. After being on for a while, and presumably overheating, it would replace the close and maximize icons with disabled text or ? and the titlebar would stay in the same place when you moved the window around the screen.

    I was very inexperienced at the time, so I just assumed this was normal.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    The Marlett reminds me of this

    Windows 95/98 used to LOVE doing this, at least here. 



  • My all-time favorite font is Saint Francis:

     

    http://www.typenow.net/files/S/saintfrancis.zip

     

    Perfect for writing ransom notes.



  • @Oliver Klozoff said:

    My all-time favorite font is Saint Francis:

     

     

    Perfect for writing ransom notes.

    You couldn't just post a sample?

    WTF?



  • @yet another Matt said:

    I was very inexperienced at the time, so I just assumed this was normal.

    A fine general-purpose quote. :) 



  • @yet another Matt said:

    I was very inexperienced at the time, so I just assumed this was normal.

    Perfect.



  • Ooooh, looks just like a lot of X11 apps (as in "Athena widgets &co:")... when they can't find the font they are looking for, they pick the first font they can find, which is usually Very Unreadable. Luckily, this funny behaviour is getting very rare in the new bold era of fontconfig. =)



  • @WWWWolf said:

    Ooooh, looks just like a lot of X11 apps (as in "Athena widgets &co:")... when they can't find the font they are looking for, they pick the first font they can find, which is usually Very Unreadable. Luckily, this funny behaviour is getting very rare in the new bold era of fontconfig. =)

    Yes, nowadays there are only two supported fonts, both of which look identical, and are badly kerned.

    Hrngh.

    "x.org: going from bad to worse since the 1980s" 



  • Oooo. The new Community Server build solves the whole Quote/Reply thing.

    @asuffield said:

    Yes, nowadays there are only two supported fonts, both of which look identical, and are badly kerned.

    You mean that I am not the only person who isn't terribly keen on the Linux system fonts? I know it's petty, but one of the most off-putting things about screenshots of the Linux GUI (whoevers it is) is the standard system font(s) -- to my eyes, it's (/they are) horrible. I never blamed it on kerning -- ATSUI in Mac OS 9 has eye-pulling bad kerning due to internally representing text as fractional pixels and then unable to draw that so letters all end up misspaced.

    Nevertheless, most other GUIs have nice system fonts -- Charcoal (OS 9), Tahoma (Win2k), Segoe (Vista), Lucida Grande (OS X) etc. Not so hot on Chicago (old Macs) or the system fonts in EIKON (the toolbar button font was seriously messed up) and some older 16-bit era Windows fonts really sucked (without even considering the joke that were the plotter fonts).

    I don't know why, but X11 desktops always look teh suck. KDE has this horrible LCD clock that looks nothing like a real 7-segment LCD (not that I want a 7-segment LCD clock, I just want the time), and the time and date on the KDE taskbar are horizontally and vertically way off centre. It doesn't take a genius to draw a clock centred in its containing area, even Microsoft do that perfectly, but not KDE. GNOME often sports really fuzzy and painfully nondescript taskbar icons that you can't identify -- it scares me how many people know nothing about image scaling. Proper hand-tweaked 16x16 icons always give far superior clarity (even better if you custom crop or custom design them for that size).

    A friend likes showing me all his Linux screenshots and they always hideous. I'd never describe Windows as stylish; it's very industrial looking (the classic theme, not the Fisher Price one) but at least it's well thought out, balanced and subtle. It normally falls down due to developers designing hideous apps with icons even more eye-wrenching than X11 ones.



  • Well, maybe Community Server still sucks

    All the "In reply to" entries have no post numbers and, sigh, my own replies get mailed to me now.

    Fix one problem, breed two replacements...



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Oooo. The new Community Server build solves the whole Quote/Reply thing.

     

    You mean it screws it up. Now I have to click twice to quote. That's worse.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    You mean that I am not the only person who isn't terribly keen on the Linux system fonts? I know it's petty, but one of the most off-putting things about screenshots of the Linux GUI (whoevers it is) is the standard system font(s) -- to my eyes, it's (/they are) horrible. I never blamed it on kerning -- ATSUI in Mac OS 9 has eye-pulling bad kerning due to internally representing text as fractional pixels and then unable to draw that so letters all end up misspaced.

    Nevertheless, most other GUIs have nice system fonts -- Charcoal (OS 9), Tahoma (Win2k), Segoe (Vista), Lucida Grande (OS X) etc. Not so hot on Chicago (old Macs) or the system fonts in EIKON (the toolbar button font was seriously messed up) and some older 16-bit era Windows fonts really sucked (without even considering the joke that were the plotter fonts).

    A friend likes showing me all his Linux screenshots and they always hideous. I'd never describe Windows as stylish; it's very industrial looking (the classic theme, not the Fisher Price one) but at least it's well thought out, balanced and subtle. It normally falls down due to developers designing hideous apps with icons even more eye-wrenching than X11 ones.

    Don't forget Corbel and Calibri for Vista -- they're really nice, if a bit small on the ex height.

    I've always blamed Linux's (and by that I mean Ubuntu/GNOME) ugly fonts on a fugly antialias algorithm. It tries to emulate Cleartype, but falls short.



  • @dhromed said:

    You mean it screws it up. Now I have to click twice to quote. That's worse.

    My PC is old and slow, and it's much faster than hitting Reply (as if it were an e-mail) and then having to hit Back, wait for the whole topic to slowly re-render, and then click Quote this time. It really doesn't help that pages are being marked as no-cache, as that stops the browser from just re-rendering the same page. I would be over the Moon if someone made a Firefox plugin to bypass all the anti-cache directives (Expires, Pragma etc) so that the Back button Just Works™ and I'd never lose form input if I needed to go back a page and alter something.

    As for the forum software, e-mails need in-built Quote and Reply links, so I don't have to follow the link to Page 1, wait for that to render enough, then click the link to the actual page with the post on, wait for that to all render, then hit Reply, and then Quote.

    Incidentally, notice the Quote=False parameter? For the DHTML inclined, a quick Greasemonkey script would convert all those into Quote links by just setting Quote=True. I tried Quote=FILENOTFOUND but sadly that didn't happen to evaluate to true :(

    @dhromed said:

    I've always blamed Linux's (and by that I mean Ubuntu/GNOME) ugly fonts on a fugly antialias algorithm. It tries to emulate Cleartype, but falls short.

    By ClearType you mean LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing? KDE/GNOME anti-aliasing looks pretty much like standard classic rounded (whole pixel) anti-aliasing, like Win 2k/XP and Mac OS 8/9 use, where strokes snap to whole pixel widths. It's much sharper than fractional pixel anti-aliasing but tends to distort letters and look a bit fugly. I can't tell if Linux suffers from bad anti-aliasing or bad fonts.

    Here's something scary -- this screenshot is the British RISC OS 3 from 1992, displaying full fractional width anti-aliasing:

    1992. By 1997, Apple had put pre-rendered anti-aliased text into the splash screen and by 2001 finally introduced fractional width AA rendering in the GUI.

    There's something bizarre though about an OS with a horrendously awful text editor (note how it wraps "editor" -- even Notepad isn't this retarded), generally non-square pixels (look at the system font close up, the cursor is the same) and a hideous GUI, that can render fractional-width type.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @dhromed said:

    I've always blamed Linux's (and by that I mean Ubuntu/GNOME) ugly fonts on a fugly antialias algorithm. It tries to emulate Cleartype, but falls short.

    By ClearType you mean LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing? KDE/GNOME anti-aliasing looks pretty much like standard classic rounded (whole pixel) anti-aliasing, like Win 2k/XP and Mac OS 8/9 use, where strokes snap to whole pixel widths. It's much sharper than fractional pixel anti-aliasing but tends to distort letters and look a bit fugly. I can't tell if Linux suffers from bad anti-aliasing or bad fonts.

     

    It's not Linux, it's KDE and Gnome. My desktop does not involve any of that crud. With the exception of firefox, all my applications use the classical X bitmap fonts, which are always perfectly aligned and shaped, without any fuzzy edges.

    They suffer mostly from a rabid desire to emulate Windows, instead of having any kind of actual plan. They have managed to combine the worst elements of Windows font rendering with some insanity of their own, and come up with a horrible mess.

    TeX has been getting this right since the 1980s. Why does everybody else insist on making up their own broken ways to get it wrong?



  • @asuffield said:

    It's not Linux, it's KDE and Gnome. My desktop does not involve any of that crud. With the exception of firefox, all my applications use the classical X bitmap fonts, which are always perfectly aligned and shaped, without any fuzzy edges.


    TeX has been getting this right since the 1980s. Why does everybody else insist on making up their own broken ways to get it wrong?

    For reference, what should the fonts look like?



  • And don't get me started on the 99.9% sameness of PHotoshop's Crisp and Smooth AA types. It takes a layer set to Difference and Levels with white all the way down to see that difference. Wtf.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I don't know why, but X11 desktops always look teh suck. KDE has this horrible LCD clock that looks nothing like a real 7-segment LCD (not that I want a 7-segment LCD clock, I just want the time),

    So change it. Personally I like the 'fuzzy clock'. Right now mine is telling me the time is "Quarter to eight". The exact time shows up as a glorified tooltip if I point the mouse at it.

    and the time and date on the KDE taskbar are horizontally and vertically way off centre. It doesn't take a genius to draw a clock centred in its containing area, even Microsoft do that perfectly, but not KDE.
    Never encountered the problem. If you're sure it's not your error, report it as a bug.

    A friend likes showing me all his Linux screenshots and they always hideous.
    You probably just have a different aesthetic sense. I'm sure if you had a little look about you could get Linux looking nice to you. And he's probably consider it fugly.



  • @asuffield said:

    It's not Linux, it's KDE and Gnome. My desktop does not involve any of that crud. With the exception of firefox, all my applications use the classical X bitmap fonts, which are always perfectly aligned and shaped, without any fuzzy edges.

    They suffer mostly from a rabid desire to emulate Windows, instead of having any kind of actual plan.

    There's a true art form in dealing with low resolution computer displays, that most people don't understand. Everything from attractive, readable type to effective icon design. I've not really figured it out yet, but bare 1-bit bitmapped fonts -- or expertly-hinted scalable type -- is surprisingly satisfactory.

    @m0ffx said:

    So change it.

    It's not my computer. Just some dude who won't quit showing me horrible screenshots from various distros and various desktops. If it was my computer, I'd want to rip the whole desktop apart and redesign it, but Linux at one time came with that belief that you needed not just a computer science degree but several decades' UNIX experience to unpackage and install a whole new desktop set-up just so that you could have something that wasn't painfully ugly, fat and slow. KDE 2 horrified me -- I wasn't prepared for the extreme amount of bloat it took for such a lousy desktop, but as a Linux n00b the last thing I know how to do is redesign the whole desktop from the ground up. I wouldn't even be able to name all the components that were involved and what part they all played, and what I was supposed to replace them with and how.

    It doesn't help that a lot of people won't be able to change anything -- the non-technical people who are supposed to move over to Linux instead of gp Vista -- so they'll effectively be trapped with an eyesore, a GUI where side-by-side KDE and GNOME apps refuse to look related and the taskbar is ghastly in so many ways.

    I am sure there are other distros that default to an attractive GUI, but that only compounds the nightmare that is choosing a distro, and in my friend's case, he's pretty limited as on his bog-standard Dell PC, SimplyMEPIS is the only one where stuff doesn't all crash and burn...



  • @dhromed said:

    I've always blamed Linux's (and by that I mean Ubuntu/GNOME) ugly fonts on a fugly antialias algorithm. It tries to emulate Cleartype, but falls short.

    Subpixel hinting as used in Cleartype is patented and defended by an active troll.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:

    It's not Linux, it's KDE and Gnome. My desktop does not involve any of that crud. With the exception of firefox, all my applications use the classical X bitmap fonts, which are always perfectly aligned and shaped, without any fuzzy edges.

    They suffer mostly from a rabid desire to emulate Windows, instead of having any kind of actual plan.

    There's a true art form in dealing with low resolution computer displays, that most people don't understand. Everything from attractive, readable type to effective icon design. I've not really figured it out yet, but bare 1-bit bitmapped fonts -- or expertly-hinted scalable type -- is surprisingly satisfactory.

    @m0ffx said:

    So change it.

    It's not my computer. Just some dude who won't quit showing me horrible screenshots from various distros and various desktops. If it was my computer, I'd want to rip the whole desktop apart and redesign it, but Linux at one time came with that belief that you needed not just a computer science degree but several decades' UNIX experience to unpackage and install a whole new desktop set-up just so that you could have something that wasn't painfully ugly, fat and slow. KDE 2 horrified me -- I wasn't prepared for the extreme amount of bloat it took for such a lousy desktop, but as a Linux n00b the last thing I know how to do is redesign the whole desktop from the ground up. I wouldn't even be able to name all the components that were involved and what part they all played, and what I was supposed to replace them with and how.

    It doesn't help that a lot of people won't be able to change anything -- the non-technical people who are supposed to move over to Linux instead of gp Vista -- so they'll effectively be trapped with an eyesore, a GUI where side-by-side KDE and GNOME apps refuse to look related and the taskbar is ghastly in so many ways.

    I am sure there are other distros that default to an attractive GUI, but that only compounds the nightmare that is choosing a distro, and in my friend's case, he's pretty limited as on his bog-standard Dell PC, SimplyMEPIS is the only one where stuff doesn't all crash and burn...

     

    You haven't seen KDE4 yet? Or Xfce?

    Or noticed that in KDE, you dont need many gnome apps? 



  • @Lingerance said:

    For reference, what should the fonts look like?

    That's surprisingly hard to answer completely. Some basic requirements include:

    Correct kerning: all pairs of letters should have the same amount of white between them. See the IE screenshot for kerning errors.

    Correct alignment: all letters shall line up precisely in the horizontal axis. See the RISCOS screenshot for an example of this being done wrong.

    High contrast: all pixels should be either almost-black or almost-white (or almost-ink/almost-page). There should not be blurry grey edges to characters, making them look out of focus. Adobe products frequently screw up here (especially Acrobat).

    Even width strokes: all lines should be the same width. See KDE/gnome/xft/fontconfig for an example of how to get this hilariously wrong.

    Even width stroke spacing: the two gaps in 'm' shall be the same size, as shall the space in Q, D, C, and O, the two gaps in 'B', etc.

     

    I've probably missed a few. Most of the major font renderers out there get a different selection of these things wrong. TeX and Quark are the only ones that get them all right.



  • @asuffield said:

    That's surprisingly hard to answer completely. Some basic requirements include

    How about images then?



  • @asuffield said:

    Correct alignment: all letters shall line up precisely in the horizontal axis. See the RISCOS screenshot for an example of this being done wrong.

    Maybe I am wrong here, but I would interpret "horizontal axis" as "x axis", i.e. the baseline. Looking at the RISC OS image, all the letters are sitting on the baseline level with each other. Some of the anti-aliasing does suggest that they're not but I don't quite know why.

    @asuffield said:

    There should not be blurry grey edges to characters, making them look out of focus.

    This one is a real toughie. Larger text sizes (e.g. headings) look pretty bad without anti-aliasing, where the jaggies start to show up too much. But anti-aliasing tends to either distort the letters, or cause blur. Even dye sublimation–printed beige text at 300 dpi needs anti-aliasing else jaggies show up; you need at least 600 dpi before you can have 1-bit smooth text. That said, at 300 dpi any anti-aliasing should not be too blurry. At 100 dpi, you're a bit hosed. We're just extra aware of the limitations of present technology – pick your poison really.

    (And yes, I do puzzle over Photoshop's different anti-aliasing settings, although they do differ. The real question is what dpi and font size combination they're intended for...)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:

    Correct alignment: all letters shall line up precisely in the horizontal axis. See the RISCOS screenshot for an example of this being done wrong.

    Maybe I am wrong here, but I would interpret "horizontal axis" as "x axis", i.e. the baseline. Looking at the RISC OS image, all the letters are sitting on the baseline level with each other. Some of the anti-aliasing does suggest that they're not but I don't quite know why.

    Look at the median (top of short letters). Note, for example, the 'w' in 'between'. What's happened is that RISC OSes attempt to avoid blur by snapping the text to the pixel grid has gone wrong, and the character has snapped one pixel too high.

    @asuffield said:

    There should not be blurry grey edges to characters, making them look out of focus.

    This one is a real toughie. Larger text sizes (e.g. headings) look pretty bad without anti-aliasing, where the jaggies start to show up too much. But anti-aliasing tends to either distort the letters, or cause blur.

    A need for anti-aliasing at large sizes indicates the use of a very poor source format. That only happens when you're scaling an image up, rather than drawing a properly stroked font.

    Anti-aliasing that introduces blur or distortion is wrong. That's aliasing, rather than anti-aliasing. A correct algorithm would not do that. Some source formats are easier to anti-alias than others. A system like truetype is extremely hard to get correct; no known universally-applicable algorithms exist, and the font designer has to write custom software embedded in the font in order to get some semblance of accuracy, and even then there's no method that's guaranteed to work. A system like metafont makes it surprisingly easy to get this right, but it was rejected by certain people because requiring font designers to write software to render their fonts is "too hard". Spot the logical inconsistancy in this paragraph.


    Even dye sublimation–printed beige text at 300 dpi needs anti-aliasing else jaggies show up; you need at least 600 dpi before you can have 1-bit smooth text. That said, at 300 dpi any anti-aliasing should not be too blurry. At 100 dpi, you're a bit hosed. We're just extra aware of the limitations of present technology – pick your poison really.

    It is indeed impossible to get eye-perfect rendering of any line at 100dpi, but it is possible to design fonts which do not create exaggerated problems. For example, the 1-bit bitmap font that I use on my terminal has the stems of 'w' completely vertical, rather than trying to draw a 30-degree line that simply cannot be done smoothly in a 10 pixel cell.

    Blurring is never the right answer. Blurring is saying "I fucked this up completely so I'm going to smear it out so badly that you can't tell". 



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:

    Correct alignment: all letters shall line up precisely in the horizontal axis. See the RISCOS screenshot for an example of this being done wrong.

    Maybe I am wrong here, but I would interpret "horizontal axis" as "x axis", i.e. the baseline. Looking at the RISC OS image, all the letters are sitting on the baseline level with each other. Some of the anti-aliasing does suggest that they're not but I don't quite know why.

    Rather than the anti-aliased font, the horizontal-axis comment may have been referring to the pixelated font in the "window" title... the lower-case "p," for example, that floats above the baseline, the sagging"f" crossbar, etc.  These kinds of non-standard lower case letters were of course very common in the ancient days of displays with fixed-matrix characters.  Ever seen a lower-case "g" in 5x7?

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:

    There should not be blurry grey edges to characters, making them look out of focus.

    This one is a real toughie. Larger text sizes (e.g. headings) look pretty bad without anti-aliasing, where the jaggies start to show up too much. But anti-aliasing tends to either distort the letters, or cause blur. Even dye sublimation–printed beige text at 300 dpi needs anti-aliasing else jaggies show up; you need at least 600 dpi before you can have 1-bit smooth text. That said, at 300 dpi any anti-aliasing should not be too blurry. At 100 dpi, you're a bit hosed. We're just extra aware of the limitations of present technology – pick your poison really.

    (And yes, I do puzzle over Photoshop's different anti-aliasing settings, although they do differ. The real question is what dpi and font size combination they're intended for...)

    I am of the opinion that fonts of any size look bad without anti-aliasing... but that's just me.

     



  • If you find X fonts unreadable with antialiasing and full hinting, you're doing it wrong.



  • @asuffield said:

    For example, the 1-bit bitmap font that I use on my terminal has the stems of 'w' completely vertical, rather than trying to draw a 30-degree line that simply cannot be done smoothly in a 10 pixel cell.

     

    Here's a sample (it's the classic 10x20) as rendered on my terminal:

    You will note how there is almost no distinctive jaggyness - it's there, but you'd have to look close to see it, or zoom in - and no blurryness at all. This is, of course, a hand-crafted bitmap font. You'll never get something this good out of xft (or cleartype or the macosx renderer, whatever it's called) at this resolution (10x20 pixels). The only renderer that comes anywhere close is metafont (although it's still not as good).

    It could be slightly improved using a hand-crafted-for-LCD font, if you were using an LCD display (which I'm not). This is because the subpixel layout of an LCD gives you an effective increase in the horizontal resolution by a factor of three, so it would be a 30x20 cell. I'm not aware of any other ways to improve on this. 



  • A set of fonts.



  • @dhromed said:

    A set of fonts.

     

    Your post reminds me of a websquatter's advertising-fest. I think it's something about the arbitrary colours, fonts, and layout.

     

    The small size with the mac renderer is indeed crap. You don't appear to have a sample of small size from cleartype, but IIRC it's not much better. Rendering fonts at large sizes is pretty easy, it'd be quite pathetic if they couldn't get that right. 



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    developers designing hideous apps with icons even more eye-wrenching than X11 ones

    "It catches the eye like a rusty hook." 

    (Source unknown, and probably horribly mangled to boot)



  • @asuffield said:

    Your post reminds me of a websquatter's advertising-fest. I think it's something about the arbitrary colours, fonts, and layout.

    Looks great, doesn;t it. :) 

    @asuffield said:

    The small size with the mac renderer is indeed crap. You don't appear to have a sample of small size from cleartype, but IIRC it's not much better. Rendering fonts at large sizes is pretty easy, it'd be quite pathetic if they couldn't get that right.

    Cleartype is excellent for small sizes: 

      Crisp like a fresh baglet of Lays'.

    I have to admit that I may have cheated a little for the mac AA. You can specify to what tiny size it must still apply AA, and I have that set to something lower than the default. But it just becomes a big blur, and that's crappy.

    In Vista, Cleartype has been improved to reduce aliasing of more horizontal edges in large sizes. Cleartype/XP fucks that up. So that would be the pathetic bit.



  • @dhromed said:

    Cleartype is excellent for small sizes...

    That even looks good on my CRT



  • Back to the OP... I saw this dialog yesterday, and Apple are using some non-standard font (non-standard for Windows anyway) for this dialog so Windows grabs the one that is closest in name.  I've seen similar behavior in other applications.

     Which proves once again that Microsoft are the real WTF...



  • @GalacticCowboy said:

    Back to the OP... I saw this dialog yesterday, and Apple are using some non-standard font (non-standard for Windows anyway) for this dialog so Windows grabs the one that is closest in name.  I've seen similar behavior in other applications.

     Which proves once again that Microsoft are the real WTF...

     

    Um. Wouldn't that prove Apple is TRWTF?



  • Nah, Apple are more of a WT*bzzt*smoke*twitch*

    In what universe is it acceptable to replace an unknown font with the nearest alphabetical match?  Shouldn't they default to something safe, like a system font?



  • In what universe is it acceptable to distribute an application with a non-standard font, without installing the font first?

    Sure that behavior may or may not be something I agree with, but what reason did Apple have for using a special font for their EULA?



  • None whatsoever, I'm sure...  but it will be the subject of the next Mac/PC commercial, no doubt.  :)



  • @GalacticCowboy said:

    None whatsoever, I'm sure...  but it will be the subject of the next Mac/PC commercial, no doubt.  :)

     

    That would be pretty typical. Apple sure has been the kings of FUD in advertising lately.



  • @GalacticCowboy said:

    Nah, Apple are more of a WT*bzzt*smoke*twitch*

    In what universe is it acceptable to replace an unknown font with the nearest alphabetical match?  Shouldn't they default to something safe, like a system font?

     

    What if an application wants to use "Verdana Second Edition Super Bold" but you only have "Verdana Second Edition Medium Bold"? Should it revert to Times New Roman then?

    I don't agree with their solution, but I guess that's what they thought.



  • @TDC said:

    @GalacticCowboy said:

    Nah, Apple are more of a WT*bzzt*smoke*twitch*

    In what universe is it acceptable to replace an unknown font with the nearest alphabetical match?  Shouldn't they default to something safe, like a system font?

     

    What if an application wants to use "Verdana Second Edition Super Bold" but you only have "Verdana Second Edition Medium Bold"? Should it revert to Times New Roman then?

    I don't agree with their solution, but I guess that's what they thought.

    This is why classical X fonts use a fontspec, which looks like:  -misc-fixed-*-*-normal--20-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1

    It is quite clear which fonts are acceptable and which ones are not. The Windows solution of "guess what sounds similar" doesn't work all that well because the guessing algorithm can't tell which fonts are from the same family and hence are suitable replacements. While the X system has many flaws, it at least does better on this one.



  • fish

    ClearType'd fonts always seem way too light to me.



  • @asuffield said:

    @TDC said:

    @GalacticCowboy said:

    Nah, Apple are more of a WTbzztsmoketwitch

    In what universe is it acceptable to replace an unknown font with the nearest alphabetical match?  Shouldn't they default to something safe, like a system font?

     

    What if an application wants to use "Verdana Second Edition Super Bold" but you only have "Verdana Second Edition Medium Bold"? Should it revert to Times New Roman then?

    I don't agree with their solution, but I guess that's what they thought.

    This is why classical X fonts use a fontspec, which looks like:  -misc-fixed-*-*-normal--20-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1

    It is quite clear which fonts are acceptable and which ones are not. The Windows solution of "guess what sounds similar" doesn't work all that well because the guessing algorithm can't tell which fonts are from the same family and hence are suitable replacements. While the X system has many flaws, it at least does better on this one.

    If you go to the Windows\Fonts directory, you can sort them by similarity. I'm not sure what exactly it's sorting by, but it's not alphabetical order.



  • @aythun said:

    ClearType'd fonts always seem way too light to me.

    And I'm always irritated by the uneven stroke widths and less than perfect kerning, which you can see here. Also, the lower-case 'l' is too tall (look at "Club").

    It's not as bad as some (xft, bleh) but it's still far short of being right. 



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    I'm not sure what exactly it's sorting by, but it's not alphabetical order.

    Me neither, but it's obviously wrong on a regular basis. 


Log in to reply