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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.).

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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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macOS doesn't bother offering a way to have non-blurry fonts without HiDPI because their solution is only having high-end hardware + mostly smaller screens. Guess everyone working on it had Macbooks or high-end Ultrabooks + flagship Android/iOS phones so it didn't bother them.

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Looks pretty trash with my 27" 4k monitors (161 DPI) so I can only imagine how bad it looks with a cheap monitor closer to traditional 96 DPI. I'm sure FreeType's auto-hinting really does a number on it. Can turn off auto-hinting to make it like macOS i.e. blurry/non-warped...

6:15 PM · Aug 12, 2021Twitter Web App

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I've tried turning off auto-hinting for it and it fixes the shape but I can't look at blurry fonts like that so I'm just replacing it with Source Sans Pro i.e. a proper modern OTF font that actually has proper carefully crafted hinting data and also isn't made to look quirky...

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Do you know if there is a way to forcibly overload a font in an application on stock Android? Or does this require a custom ROM?

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