Discussion

Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

addycb: Ai writing

ddtaylor: Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits.Ad-HomineLLM

nimih: AI writing is worse on the merits: it is lower quality and has concerning externalities associated with its production.

lukeasch21: It's also reasonably effective proxy to determine whether somebody is actually passionate about the topic they're writing about. If you've got a very strong interest in a specific niche you're typically able to pour pages and pages of ink down talking about it. If you can't be bothered to take the necessary time to distill your thoughts, it signals to me that your thoughts on the topic aren't as worthwhile as someone who's deeply invested in it.Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible when English isn't their first language.

captainbland: The attention economics are bad more than anything else. LLM articles ask us to put more time into reading it than the LLM put into writing it. Actually committing time to production is the minimum bar which suggests something is worth our time in a world where so much is already vying for our attention.

CarVac: I made a bitmap font for the PhobGCC project for use in its video output but I don't know how to make it into a bitmap font for use on computers.

0907: I've dabbled a few times in writing bitmap font parsers for both technically constrained and artistic projects. There is a reason that design has resolved to the same few niches, because expectability, latent understanding, and 'obviousness' reduces onboarding curve and fatigue. It's a cognitive accessibility issue before you even get to legitimate accessibility concerns. Render a .F16 at anything larger than 16px in a modern application and you're introducing issues which are solved, quantitatively and qualitatively, by vector graphics and antialiasing. There's an optimistic naivety which is nice to have, but misunderstands design as a conduit for informed action vs design as an aesthetic function independent of intent is legitimately dangerous if you're doing anything other than building narrative products emulating older tech.

agumonkey: I often question myself on why the aesthetics of personal computing were so special our brains that it sticks to this day.

kstrauser: It was an era when you could know a machine. I had a C64 and had a huge chunk of its kernal addresses memorized from sheer repetition. You could remember its whole ISA and timings. The memory map was learnable. The hardware interfaces were simple.I have zero desire to use a C64 again, aside from the occasional nostalgia pang for a specific game or program. But I do miss that feeling of complete, total understand of the thing in front of me. I think that’s the feeling that implanted on me, and that the aesthetics conjure. “Hey, the world is complicated, but this font looks a lot like the time when you felt like you knew everything.”

wastewastewaste: It reads like a dog wrote it. Whether the writer is terrible or LLM being terrible, get this shit out of here

VorpalWay: I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font they mention also seem interesting.In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything but bitmap fonts in recent years.

noisem4ker: Well-hinted fonts such as Consolas are indeed very rare.I think I've only found Liberation and Hack to appear decent on standard density display. Roboto Mono is nicely shaped but blurry. I think Noto Mono used to have hints but dropped them. It was hours spent trying out different fonts only to ultimately go back to msttcore-fonts for me.

cmdrk: 100% the same problem here.I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?

efilife: Someone here a couple of months ago made a tool[0] to detect AI writing on websites. This one gets categorized as "pure slop" https://tropes.fyi/vetter/d7cebcde[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513

andrewshadura: From that website: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence. Extremely common in Claude and ChatGPT markdown output. Almost nobody formats lists this way when writing by hand. It's a telltale sign of AI-generated documentation and blog posts AND README files (especially with emojis)."That’s bullshit. It’s very common.

susam: When I wrote my own Invaders game (which was a childhood dream by the way), I was quite unhappy with the rendering quality of CanvasRenderingContext2D.fillText() on the game canvas. The antialiasing introduced various shades of green whereas I wanted to render the text with a solid monochrome green colour while the glyphs retain their crisp and jagged edges. Using canvas { image-rendering: pixelated } improved the crispiness and jaggedness but it still introduced multiple shades of green.I finally decided to take the matter into my own hands, take an IBM PC OEM font or something similar to it, put the bitmaps as integer arrays within my code and use that to render each character text by text. I am very happy with the results.You can see it here: https://susam.net/invaders.htmlEverything in this game including the text is drawn with CanvasRenderingContext2D.fillRect().The bitmap array is here: https://codeberg.org/susam/invaders/src/branch/main/invaders...In fact, I spun off the bitmap array as its own project here: https://codeberg.org/susam/pcface

KronisLV: Can confirm that Terminus is pretty nice, used it as my main programming font for a little bit, before moving over to Iosevka!

Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended resolution.

crazygringo: > 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.

mrob: >jaggies are a visual distractionSo 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.

crazygringo: 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.