Comment by crazygringo
7 hours ago
> Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended resolution.
This seems to be the center of the author's argument.
But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness.
Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies.
I don't want my computer to feel like some nostalgic 1980's computer. I just want to get my work done, which involves a lot of reading and writing, both code and non-code, which is just more legible with vector fonts on a retina screen.
At the end of the day, jaggies are a visual distraction. They're cool if you want a retro vibe that distracts and calls attention to itself for aesthetic purposes. But not for general computer usage.
> Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies.
Not all of us are in that position, and modern font rendering has gotten really bad on non-high DPI monitors, so using a bitmap font has been a way to get rid of the blur and get back to sharp crisp text.
For me, I'd rather have jagged text than a blurry literally headache inducing mess.
That said, the issue here isn't that one is better than the other, but that for some people one or the other is easier to read, and the right answer is that all of this need to be configurable. Just like light and dark mode.
OP is taking screenshots of low-res bitmap fonts on a high-res Mac screen (note the perfectly smooth window controls).
They're making an argument for bitmap fonts even on modern Retina displays as far as I can tell, since they're talking about making modern computers feel like older computers.
I'm pushing against that.
>jaggies are a visual distraction
So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or blackletter it will start to look normal to you. I disable anti-aliasing because I'm accustomed to aliasing and it doesn't distract me at all. In exchange, I get sharp text on an 1080p monitor, effectively quadrupling my graphics performance because I no longer need 4K. I'd prefer bitmap fonts, but in practice I find full automatic hinting of vector fonts good enough.
The only cases where I can see anti-aliasing helping are with Chinese and Japanese fonts, which have characters with unusually fine details. But on any GUI using Fontconfig you can enable anti-aliasing for those fonts specifically and leave it disabled for the rest.
Serifs are chosen intentionally to be harmonious with the overall letterforms. They provide a feeling of visual stability and additional cues for recognizing letterforms. They provide a kind of consistency. They're not a distraction.
Jaggies come from a limitation of the pixel grid. They arbitrarily make diagonal strokes and curves bumpy while horizontal and vertical strokes are perfectly smooth, an inconsistency that would otherwise have no rhyme or reason behind it. Before letterforms were constrained to square grids, nobody was making diagonals and curves bumpy because it was a desirable aesthetic effect.
Jaggies are a distraction from the underlying letterform we all recognize. We know they are an undesirable distortion. Serifs are not. They serve an intentional aesthetic purpose, proportioned in a carefully balanced way.
Serifs are a skeuomorphic artifact of stone-carved text. They're no more legible than sans-serif fonts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492894 ). The only reason people like them is because they're used to them. You can get the same feeling from bitmap fonts if you read them enough.
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