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Comment by arnorhs | Hacker News Reader

How well, if at all, do these fonts scale upwards?

Not at all of course, they're bitmap fonts that rely on subpixel rendering.

Basically: This font is created such that it looks good when subpixel-rendered at a size of 3px. If you wanted text larger than 3px, you would not ever want to use this font, you would use something else that can either be regularly rendered at your chosen size, or subpixel-rendered at your chosen size.

It's a bitmap font, so it scales as any pixels would but far from well when it comes to readability. If you look at the 1600% up-scale you get a good idea what I am talking about.

I remember making these types of fonts myself back in the Amiga days just to fit it on bootsector(s) (memory fails me here, was it one or two?). The difference then was that sub pixel rendering was not an option, and fixed width fonts at this size always looked bad (i vs m), so you'd have to be careful how you wrote things. :-)

Without having ever experimented with subpixel rendering I am intrigued by the fact that « is made a whole lot more "blue" than » -- spontaneously one would think it would simply be a matter of mirroring the glyphs (obviously not) :)

The subpixels are RGB in that order. So the heavier "image concentration" on the right side means there'd be more blue.

If you want to experiment with subpixel rendering, and you have a reasonably modern Firefox, I made a subpixel-rendering toy a while ago: http://zork.net/~st/Toys/subpixel-sketch.html

If you don't have a modern Firefox, there's a screenshot here: http://zork.net/~st/Toys/subpixel-sketch.png

That's neat, but I wish I could click and drag to change multiple pixels at once, instead of clicking and clicking and clicking.

This well: http://grab.by/2eT3

That's from the Mac OS X zoom function. Interestingly, it's far more readable than the zoomed-in graphic on their page.

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