What on EARTH is happening with the "z" and the "e" here? Like both the kerning and the "little z big e" effect
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From replies, it does appear some of the problem I'm having is specific to Android (maybe Android 8). So that's less bizarre than it could be. Problem: SOME of the "surprising" heights/descenders (g, m, n, r, t) were intentional. I can't tell what's a bug
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Replying to @mcclure111
here’s iOS for comparison; definitely something squirrelly happening with that font on android
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Continuing to be totally confused which of the problems with this font are platform-specific render bugs and which are intentional bad decisions. Have now seen screenshots of the font on Android 10, and Firefox on Windows 10, with the sPoNGeBoB eFfFeCt
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Joar, nicht so nice.
Der neue Font sieht ziemlich verballert aus: twitter.com/mcclure111/sta…
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But on the other hand, the hugeass descender on lowercase "t" on my phone looks even with the "overshoot" line (letter "o") on other people's machines. So... was it *intentional* that t has a descender? How much of the bad was on purpose
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Replying to
Incredible.
Twitter made a big announcement saying "hey we did it, we made our own font!" and it turns out they missed an important aspect of the font to make it look good on THE MAJORITY OF SMART PHONES
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It looks pretty bad on any non-HiDPI screen.
macOS fonts have always been blurry without HiDPI since they don't bother with hinting. Windows applies a bunch of fancy technology to make high quality fonts look great and has a bunch of hacks for legacy low quality ones like Arial.
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Linux/Android have the same kind of rendering as Windows for modern fonts with proper hinting data.
They aren't as good at making legacy fonts with screwed up hinting data look good but there are compatible replacements like Liberation with proper hinting data included in them.
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Linux only uses vertical hinting data now since with a typical monitor and orientation there's 3x as much horizontal resolution from subpixels. If that's missing, it does auto-hinting, which screws up the shape so it doesn't look blurry like it always does on non-HiDPI macOS.
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Windows is similar without proper hinting data but it's a bit smarter. Twitter's font doesn't look much better on Windows vs. properly configured open source font rendering stack with the patented features enabled (i.e. default on Ubuntu, Arch, Android, etc. but not RHEL, etc.).
I have 2x 27" 4k monitors (same model) next to each other with separate Linux and Windows computers so it's easy for me to compare.
Windows is screwing it up slightly less but it's still awful. I don't understand how a huge company makes a font without hinting in 2021.
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It makes it very clear that Twitter only cared how it looked on high end smartphones and very high end laptops with HiDPI screens. It's going to look terrible for anyone looking at it on any typical desktop monitor. macOS vs. Windows is just blurry+non-warped vs. sharp+warped.
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